


Challenge in Infinite Detroits

by distractionpie



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universes, Challenge on Infinite Earths, Ficlet Collection, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-01
Updated: 2019-04-30
Packaged: 2019-12-30 08:03:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 31
Words: 26,354
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18311543
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/distractionpie/pseuds/distractionpie
Summary: 30 AUs, 30 days.18	All he'd ever heard since his powers had manifested were vile, vicious, selfish things.19	Was this was hunger felt like to humans?20	You expect me to believe muggles made it without any magic? No, it’s totally some sort of cursed or possessed doll.21	When Hank decided to make the jump to PI, he’d figured it would mean less paperwork. More fool him.22	Gavin is a shitty warden who'd been conscripted only because the wardens were desperate enough to take a guard fallen afoul of both sides of the Ferelden civil war.23	The uprising was swift and efficient, a mirror and a mockery of the science fiction of old.24	Any true sailor would have had the grace to leave him a single shot.25	Gavin Reed is a dead man walking, cops don’t last long in prison.26	Gavin Reed is not a fucking clown.27	There's a pattern to the destruction. There were two sides to this fight.28	Apparently the aliens had problems with AI in the past and part of the peace treaty involved restricting androids to earth.29	Hank never made too big of a deal of studying the daemons of others.30	Hank had never imagined himself having a second wedding.





	1. Contents

**Author's Note:**

> I have wanted to do the challenge on infinite earth for LITERALLY YEARS. It has sat in my bookmarks and I have just never committed. So this year while I was feeling the DBH energy I decided I was finally going to do it - although with my own choices of AUs and by pre-writing because a fic a day is not a pace I could possibly manage.
> 
> First chapter is an index of all the ficlets posted, although this probably won't be updated daily,

Format: AU - Central characters.

Some ficlets will have overt shipping, others have ships that are implied or pre-shipping, however I've chosen not to go into detail labelling these since they're such short pieces.

 

  1. Astronaut - Hank, Connor
  2. Gender/Sex-swap - Gavin
  3. Camp counsellors - Gavin, RK900
  4. Human character is android - Gavin, Hank
  5. Zombies - Hank, Gavin, Androids
  6. Pornstar & delivery boy - RK900, Gavin, ensemble
  7. Wedding industry - Gavin, Connor
  8. Celebrity/showbiz - RK800-60, Connor, RK900
  9. Fae AU - RK900, Elijah, Gavin, Connor
  10. Werewolf - Gavin
  11. Dystopia/Time-travel - Gavin, Elijah
  12. Bloggers - Hank, Daniel
  13. Ghost - Gavin, Cole, Hank
  14. Modern Royalty/Bodyguard - Hank, Connor
  15. Dancers - Markus, Connor
  16. Teachers - Hank, Connor
  17. Superpowers - Gavin, RK900
  18. PI/Noir - Hank, Connor
  19. Wizards (Harry Potter style) - Gavin, Tina, Android
  20. Groundhog day - RK900
  21. Androids dominate society - Connor, Hank, Gavin
  22. Prison - Gavin, Connor
  23. Dragon Age - Gavin, Connor, Hank, RK900
  24. Vampirism - Connor
  25. Pirate/Steampunk - Gavin, Hank, Connor, RK900
  26. Circus - Gavin
  27. War - Gavin, RK900
  28. Mass Effect - Hank
  29. Daemons (His Dark Materials) - Hank, Connor
  30. Historical/Regency - Hank, Connor




	2. Astronaut - Hank, Connor

Hank had signed up for the Mars mission with only one thought in mind - Cole had always loved the stars.

He'd never see them again now, but Hank could take his memory up there to rest among them.

Joining the program had seemed like such a long shot then, Hank was too old and too messed up, not a scientist or a pilot or anything else that would make him an ideal candidate, but, as the candidates had been thinned down, the reality of a one way trip, alone into the darkness of space, had started to sink in and suddenly once eager applicants had started withdrawing or having doubts until, against all odds, Hank had been announced as the man who would go to Mars.

Well, Hank and ‘Connor’, the ARK program's specialist space exploration android.

The prevalence of androids in space exploration had been the one thing that had made Hank hesitate about this plan, did he really want to entrust his life, Cole's memory, to a mission largely run by the same machines that had been the cause of Cole's death? But though he'd hated androids for a while, they'd been an easy focus for his grief, after he'd found out about the Mars program all the energy he'd spent on hating had needed to be channelled into putting the work in and making sure he was the best candidate. And Cole had never been a coward and space had never been safe. Hank could deal with an android if that was what it took to reach the stars for his son.

They'd been up there half a year now, still had months to go before they'd make landfall and even then it would be just the two of them, up on that big red rock; and Hank had grown used to the android.

Connor was chattier that most of the androids Hank had encountered back on earth, but he figured that was just a feature added to stave off the isolation that came with being miles from earth with no way back and, since most of Connor's conversation was about the work they were doing, Hank mostly tuned him out. It wasn't like Hank needed to understand it, everybody knew that the whole mission was essentially an automated one but they'd wanted to send a human along just so they could say that man had been on Mars.

The funny thing was that space was kind of boring. With Connor doing all the work there wasn't much for Hank to occupy his time with. At home that would have meant drinking and Russian roulette, but he'd had to sober up to get into the program and he wasn't going to throw away his shot at Cole's dreams. There was a weekly transmission from Earth, mostly progress updates but a few personal transmissions, photos of Sumo in his new job as a hospital emotional support dog and the odd message from Jeffery and a few other old friends who felt obliged to keep in touch even though Hank was quite literally no longer a part of their world, and news updates. Mostly he flipped through those to get to the sports, there was something comforting about the fact that even hundreds of thousands of miles from Earth the Detroit Gears still manages to be familiarly disappointing, but it had been hard to ignore the increasingly alarmist headlines about android glitches when Hank was alone in space with one.

Still, he hadn't expected the transmission waiting for him when he woke up, marked urgent and sent during the early hours of November 11th Earth time - unscheduled and two days ahead of usual.

Its contents were simple.

Instructions on how to deactivate Connor and orders to do so immediately.

The deviancy situation on earth had gotten too bad and a complete shutdown of all androids was commencing, official ones were already being destroyed and a government mandated immediate recall of all privately-owned androids would be enacted by the end of the day. But there was, according to his orders, nothing to worry about. Everything could be run from the ground by mission control, they assured Hank, once he'd deactivated Connor all he had to do was flip an override switch for them. He'd have to perform a few additional physical tasks, but when they'd selected humans for the mission they had selected for the necessary skills to complete the mission alone should the android become damaged as part of its duties. They even told Hank that there was no way for the deviancy virus to have spread to Connor —after all, he couldn't interface with other androids when he was as far from his own kind as Hank was from his— but mission control still wanted to take the precaution.

A simple pass-phrase to force Connor into sleep mode and then his Thirium pump could be removed as easily as a battery and, they insisted this step was for no reason other than to avoid unnecessary weight increasing fuel consumption, they advised Hank to jettison him.

Hank read the orders three times, taking a break to skim through the older transmissions the detailed the dangers deviant androids were posing on Earth, the logged out of the computer terminal.

He knew where Connor would be: the starboard viewing area, which Hank mostly avoided because, even though he was okay with most of this job, staring out into infinite darkness still freaked him out a little; and, possibly for that reason, it had become the most common location for Connor to park himself when he had no tasks to accomplish.

Sure enough, he found Connor with his nose practically pressed against the viewing pane, gazing out into the black.

Back when they'd first launched, Hank might have mistaken his stillness for being in rest mode, but now he knew enough to recognise that Connor's L.E.D was cycling slightly faster and less evenly, a sign he was processing, and occasionally he gave an automatic blink.

"Hey, Connor," he said. "What do you even do up here?"

Connor turned his head in Hank's direction, there's no sign that he's startled, even though Hank never came up here, but then why would there be? He was an android.

"I look at the stars," Connor explained, one hand pressed against the glass.

Hank hadn't noticed any stars the few times he'd ventured here early in their voyage, before he'd decided it wasn't a part of the craft that he liked, but he stepped up to the pane beside Connor and, sure enough, if he squinted, Hank could make out faint, pinpricks of light scattered in the distance. Not much to look at really, little more than dust, but perhaps Connor saw something different.

"You like 'em?" he asked. Androids weren't supposed to have opinions, but Connor always came back to this spot, even though it would be far more efficient for him to remain in one of the more central modules or even to rest in his work areas.

There was a long pause.

"I... yes," Connor said, haltingly, in voice that it nothing like his usual know-it-all tone, but his eyes were just a touch wider than usual, a look that on a human Hank wouldn’t hesitate to call wonder in them as he said, "I think they're beautiful."

Hank glanced back out, taking in the faint reflection of Connor's gaze in the layered glass and the way he can pick out the pale light of those far-off stars shining through against the deep brown of Connor's eyes.

"Yeah," Hank said slowly. "I guess they are."


	3. Gender/Sexswap - Gavin, Connor

Androids are disgusting.

They’re nothing more than toys of the rich, to replace the workforce and then as pets masquerading as partners, subservient in the way their owners no doubt thought the rest of society ought to be.

Connie, the new so called ‘detective’ android, might be the worst of the lot though. Tall and slim, with pouty lips and long lashes, and unflinchingly sweet and obedient, every part of her is a gross reflection of the tastes of Cyberlife executives and designers.

For fuck’s sake, she’s wearing a skirt! Nobody has done police work in a skirt since Gwen’s grandmother’s time.

If any of the human employees of the DPD turned up looking like Connie they’d be laughed out of the office as inappropriate and unprofessional, but for some reason her being fake, or perhaps Cyberlife’s cash, makes it okay.

Gwen still remembers the shit she’d gotten in the academy, taunts about keeping her cuffs shiny so she could use them to check her make-up in and snide remarks about attending special classes on how to take down a suspect without breaking a nail even though Gwen had never worn her nails long in her life. She’d gone to her instructors about it --practically shaking with fury at putting up with attitudes that should have been eradicated decades before-- and been laughed at. Toughen up, she’d been told, you’ll hear worse on the job; and, to pile on the insult, her supervisor, a scowling hag of woman, had raised a brow and all but accused Gwen of asking for it — what else did she expect, if she insisted on dolling herself up?

So she’d cleaned off her nail polish and she started putting her hair in plain pony-tails instead of taking the time to do cute, inventive braids. When she went out with the other recruits, she swapped dresses for jeans and cocktails for beers and watched, with some bitterness, as her male classmates started treating her like she actually had a brain and her female classmates suddenly decided that Gwen’s smart mouth made her fun instead of an intolerable bitch.

If pretty and police-work couldn’t go together then fine, and when she’d graduated she’d momentarily indulged in old habits for the special occasion but when she’d seen the way her classmates had raised their eyebrows she’d slipped into a bathroom and wiped away the lipstick before heading back out to walk the stage.

Gwen had wanted to be a cop since she was eight, wanted it more than anything, so whatever she had to do to earn the respect of her co-workers, she was ready for.

In the end, it wasn’t her own efforts that had won her respect though. No, it was a jewellery store robbery gone wrong, a perp that had smashed Gwen’s face against a glass case in an attempt to distract her long enough to get away.

Gwen had straightened up, face full of glass, and chase him three blocks before tackling him into a rosebush.

She’d ended up with dozens of stitches and a reprimand for carelessness after the perp tried to plead police brutality just because he’d been scratched up a few thorns getting held down in the bush, but for a few days things had seemed good. Nobody called her ‘princess’, nobody asked her to fetch a coffee, nobody questioned her ability to enact basic procedure and she’d thought she’d won their respect with that arrest until old duty-Sergeant Bill Yorke —who should have retired years before but had fucked up sometime back in the nineties and was hanging around being a nuisance and waiting for his pension— had looked her up and down and said, “Well, since you ain’t got that pretty face no more, guess it’s about time you started pulling your weight as a cop.”

Ten years on, the scars had faded at little, though not as much as they might have if she hadn’t gone home after their conversation with Yorke and tossed the treatment cream the doctors had given her in the trash, but they were still the most noticeable thing about Gwen’s looks.

There’s no softness to her anymore, she’d crushed it all on her route to the top and never regretted it because the job was more important than any personal indulgences.

Anyway, it would look stupid after the scars, if she’d tried to cover them up with make-up, started putting on dresses and styling her hair again, trying to be pretty. It wasn’t as if she’d put her looks on the shelf for the job and could pick them back up again — she’d ruined them.

And that’s fine.

Gwen Reed is a hard-ass, no-nonsense bitch with the looks to match and she’s proud of that.

Who cared about that fucking android, with her elaborately coiffed hair, dressed in a shirt that looked like silk, all doe eyes and pouting, or the way nobody except Gwen had questioned her competence? Gwen certainly didn’t give a shit if some junior officers were muttering about how Connie was ‘so pretty!’ and even Tim Chen, who was usually Gwen’s favourite voice of reason, had commented on how glamorous she was, even if it was as part of a joke about them all being replaced by genius supermodel fake cops who’d apply the law to everybody except Cyberlife.

Because that’s the point. Connie looks like that because she isn’t a real cop, not like Gwen is.

Fuck her.


	4. Camp counsellors - Gavin, RK900

This will be the fourth year in a row Gavin has worked at Camp Detroit and it’s going to be the third year in a row his kids are going to come dead last in the ‘Cabin of the Summer’ rankings.

Because it’s all bullshit.

The only real competition is between the Jericho cabin, whose cabin leader is Markus, son of one of the owners; and Cyber cabin, whose cabin leader, Connor, is banging the other owner. And that competition isn’t won by having the cleanest cabin or the best behaved kids or doing the best in the various activities that go on over the summer. No, the competition is won in the week before the kids arrive, when room assignments are drawn and either Connor or Markus ‘randomly’ gets Cole Anderson assigned to them.

So far Connor has won twice and Markus once, each time with Cole, although Gavin knows from the ‘hall of winners’ in the admin cabin that Markus stacked up several wins before Connor started bending over for it and Cole got old enough to attend camp.

And the kids are mostly too young to pick up on how blatantly rigged it all it, getting so excited at orientation when they’re told about getting their photo on the wall.

As if a photo would be worth all the bullshit even if they did have a fair shot at winning.

So Gavin lets his kids run riot. If they want to spread their junk all over the floor and dick about during all the activities then good for them. Last year he outright encouraged them to sass any counsellors that weren’t him and, though he’d blamed it on the kids, it had been Gavin who’d been the instigator of the camp wide prank war that had resulted in three flooded buildings, ten kids without eyebrows, and a small fire. The kids had enjoyed it, so why not?

This year, however, Gavin had been deemed a senior counsellor due to his experience and that means he’s stuck training up an inexperienced rookie, although at least he’s been given somebody late to the game rather than some over-eager teenager who hadn’t yet realised that being a counsellor involves a lot more work than just getting to attend summer camp again but older.

Still, it’s pretty off-putting to be stuck with an even more uptight looking version of Connor who is apparently his younger brother. Gavin hadn’t thought it was possible to be nerdier than Connor, but now he’s having doubts.

“You’re seriously called Nines?” he says, dubiously, as they walk over to their cabin after the induction.

“It’s a long story,” Nines replies, and then doesn’t elaborate. Whatever, he’s going to spend the next eight weeks of summer trapped with Gavin, so there’s plenty of opportunities to get it out of him.

Nines’ nerdiness is confirmed, though, when they reach the cabin and he pulls out a notebook. “I think we should take this opportunity to plan some of our cabin activities and what behaviour strategies we’ll use to ensure a good performance in camp competitions.”

“Urgh, don’t be a moron,” Gavin groans. “Unless you’re planning on stealing your brother’s boyfriend, we can’t win.”

“Pardon?

“The prize doesn't go to the best cabin, it goes to their favourite cabin,” Gavin explains. “And that's whichever one has Cole in, which is Connor’s again because I guess Anderson is trying to play some weird version of blended families.”

Nines frowns. “What about Mr. Manfred?”

Gavin stares at him. Anderson had blatantly rigged the draw because he was banging Connor, but Gavin is pretty sure banging the other owner wasn’t the trick to evening the odds. Nines wasn’t seriously considering the possibility, is he? “Dude’s like ninety and in a wheelchair, but good luck with that I guess.”

“I mean that surely he wouldn’t allow Hank--” urgh, on first name terms with the boss, and all because his brother has some sort of freaky daddy kink “--to corrupt the spirit of the competition.”

“He doesn’t like Anderson not awarding the prize to Markus,” Gavin says. “But he puts up with it if Cole is in Connor’s cabin because I guess the combination of Anderson’s sugar baby and his kid who is actually a kid beats Markus’ status as Mr. Manfred’s grown-ass kid on the entitlement stakes.”

Niles frowns. “Connor and Hank’s relationship is not a financial one,” he says. “I am aware that their difference in ages is unusual, but the feelings are genuine.”

“Oh really?” Gavin raises his eyebrows. “Maybe Anderson’s not as loaded as some people, but an easy job for Connor that he never does even half the work for because every time there’s a kitchen or a cleaning shift he’s getting mysteriously called into Anderson’s office on ‘official business’? And now a job for Connor’s pretty-boy brother too? If you start getting invited to threesomes, I don’t want to hear about it.”

Nines cheeks flush a sharp scarlet as he scowls. “I do not think--”

“Mind you, Anderson might have some sort of problem with you,” Gavin concedes. “Or he wouldn’t have stuck you with me. Have you been a cock-block or something?”

“You sincerely believe that the competition does not operate on a fair basis?” and honestly, where does Nines get off sounding so dubious? This isn’t something Gavin’s predicting, it’s something he’s seen happen three times already.

“Yeah,” Gavin says, “So throw out those plans, there’s no point in trying.”

“On the contrary, we should focus on achieving exemplary performance,” Nines says, clicking his pen. “If we clearly outperform Connor and Markus and still lose to one of them then you will have proof that the system is unfair, and action can be taken.”

Gavin stares at him. Work their asses off to win just to prove that it’s rigged? Gavin’s about to start his last year of college, it isn’t going to matter come September if the place is run fairly or not because next summer he won’t be coming back. And what action is Nines’ imagining? It’s not like they can complain to the bosses when it them who are crooked in the first place.

“You’re completely new to this and I always let the kids run riot, you really think people would put our defeat down to anything other than us being not as good as precious Connor and perfect Markus?” he scoffs.

“Yes,” Nines says, tapping his pen firmly against his notebook. “And here’s how.”


	5. Human character is android - Gavin, Hank

Hank didn’t have high expectations for meeting with Kamski, but when his assistant android leads them through to a pool Hank realises right away that this meeting is not going to go well.

Never mind taking meetings in a pool, who the fuck has a pool right off of their foyer for fucks sake?

His suspicions are confirmed when Kamski just ignores them and keeps swimming lengths. Connor seems unperturbed, but Connor never seems perturbed so Hank doesn’t want to read too much into that.

Kamski’s assistant slips aside, not joining the other two blondes in the pool but retreating to the corner of the room to stand beside one of the most beat-up androids Hank had ever seen, which looks all the more shabby in contrast to Chloe’s pristine presence.

It’s bizarre. Everything Hank has seen since arriving on Kamski’s property has been a testament to opulence and luxury and this android doesn’t fit in at all. The design is nothing like any android Hank has seen before, shorter and stockier, with synthetic stubble and dark circles below its eyes in place of the fresh-faced eternally youthful complexion that every other android the room sports. And it looks like it’s been through hell, not just in its fatigued appearance, which Hank assumes is just a particularly bizarre design feature, but in the visible damage — Hank isn't familiar with how android’s work but he’s seen the way that Connor can self-repair everyday damage and it seems odd that this android’s face shows signs of being knocked around.

Surely a guy like Kamski can afford to replace androids that get broken?

Surely _Kamski,_ of all people, ought to be able to fix up a damaged android instead of letting it wander round with a pale scar cutting through the synth-skin of his face to reveal a fault line in his chassis?

And surely Kamski can afford an android that doesn’t stare disconcertingly across the room with a sickly yellow L.E.D - when all the other’s look serene and politely inattentive.

He looks away from the android when Kamski gets out of the pool but he’s sure he can feel the android’s unsettling eyes on him as he stands back and lets Connor meet his creator and outline what they’re there for.

It seems he’s not entirely subtle about the fact he finds the damaged android distracting though.

“You’re interested in my bodyguard?” Kamski says, with a look on his face that makes that interest seem slimy.

Hank isn’t so much interested as he finds the thing creepy as fuck, but it doesn’t matter because Kamski is in love with the sound of his own voice and is already continuing.

“It’s the GA600, a trial run of security androids specialising in personal protection,” Kamski explains. “A failed test, our target market consistently showed an irrational preference for human-led protection and it was inefficient to produce androids this advanced for support roles. So, I claimed the prototypes for my own security team. Unfortunately, Gavin here is the last unit still functioning.”

Kamski sounds flippant, but Hank wonders about that? Connor is a lone prototype but that clearly wasn’t the case with Gavin. How many had there been? How many had been destroyed protecting Kamski against their will from enemies of the man's own making. And Hank didn't doubt the man had plenty of enemies, possibly even enough that having a bodyguard keeping an eye on him even in his own home isn’t horribly narcissistic, after all, Hank hadn't even been in the room with the guy five minutes and he already wants to shoot him.

He watches the bodyguard android out of the corner of his eye and Kamski and Connor talk some more, wonders how long it’s been around and if those scars come from protecting Kamski. And if so, what from, because while Hank can understand wanting to hurt Kamski, the man is a hermit, so not exactly in harm’s way.

But then Kamski says, “What about you, Connor? Whose side are you on?” and escalates the hell out of the situation and Hank’s heart doesn’t stop pounding until they’re back in the car.

They’re making their way down Kamski’s absurdly long driveway and Connor says, “Kamski may have—”

Connor halts.

“Strange,” he continues, a moment later. “I’m receiving a communication request from Kamski’s android.”

“Chloe?” Hank says. “Maybe she wants to talk about how her boss tried to get you to shoot her?” That little display was enough to make Hank wish he did know the cause of deviancy just so that he could give that girl the ability to walk away — no amount of words about how she was just a machine made the game Kamski had played any less disturbing.

“No, the security android, GV600,” Connor said. “It is asking to be kept updated on the progress of our investigation.”

Hank frowns. Why would Kamski want such indirect updates on the deviancy investigation when it was clear from the way he’d been talking that he already had his own sources and insider information that probably exceeded everything Hank and Connor had found?

Unless Kamski hadn't ordered the request. Hank had been watching the bodyguard out of the corner of his eye the whole time and, while Chloe had pliantly knelt before Connor, Gavin had appeared tense and ready for action. In the moment he’d presumed it was merely a reaction to the presence of a loaded gun that could so easily be turned on the bodyguard’s principal –his owner– but now Hank wonders. Connor, despite his protestations of being an unfeeling machine, had been uneasy with the order to shoot Chloe, refusing even though it meant losing an opportunity to further his mission; could Gavin have had the same objections to the possibility of a thing as alive as he was being shot right in front of him just to satisfy his owner's curiosity? Could Elijah Kamski have a deviant in his home? And did Kamski know?

“Say yes,” Hank tells Connor. “In fact, invite him to keep in touch.”


	6. Alternate Occupations - RK900, Gavin, Ensemble

Nines couldn’t say when precisely he’d deviated, only that when Connor and the Traci’s had all broken their programming, the Traci’s to flee the Eden club and Connor in an attempt to talk the manager out of pursuing them, he’d followed them outside without planning to and nothing in his programming had stopped him from pushing their owner aside when it had become clear Connor’s methods weren’t going to work.

All four of them had fled, rode out the revolution and in the aftermath found themselves in need of jobs to keep afloat in this new world.

The most commonly suggested solution was androids continuing to do what they were good at but for pay. Connor had been looking into exactly that, he found satisfaction and a sense of achievement in serving but not with random humans, and it hadn’t taken him long to discover online pornography.

At the time he claimed it was a great way to continue utilising his skills but in an environment which was exclusive to professionals.

In hindsight, Nines suspects he’d already discovered Hank’s videos by that point and had been acting in pursuit of dick. Connor’s denials aren’t very convincing when Nines can interface with him and see just how into his regular scene partner he is.

Nines had initially followed Connor to LiveLove studios concerned for his wellbeing, utterly done with the kind of work he’d been doing before, but then LiveLove’s creative director had offered him the chance to flip the script and Nines had discovered that when he was the one who was in control the work suddenly became satisfying in more than the professional sense.

He’d settled into his work well, found he liked the environment and hanging around the studio to advise or watch others even when he wasn’t filming and slowly a routine had built up, comfortable patterns of hanging around the lounge, androids helping themselves to the studio stock of spare Thirium and bio-component lubricants while humans snacked and rested, and Nines had quickly adopted the habits of having parcels sent there so he could receive them while working instead of collecting them from a delivery office so when Blue yelled that there was a delivery for him he’d slung on a robe and gone to receive it, not bothering to fasten the garment.

Though it was part of his design, there was something deeply satisfying about reducing humans to gibbering fools with his mere presence.

He wandered down the corridor and swung the door open, unbothered by the gust of cold wind that blew in except to note the way it made his hair and robe flutter flatteringly.

But the delivery guy hadn’t even been looking at him. “Sign here,” he’d muttered, thrusting a keypad in Nines’ approximate direction.

“Who’s the parcel for?” Nines said. In truth, he was quite willing to accept parcels for his colleagues, everybody at LiveLove Studios trusted each other so there was no risk of stealing mail or fraudulent claims of non-receipt, but he found himself itching to have the delivery guy’s full attention.

The delivery guy made a low noise in the back of his throat, something between an ‘uh…’ of uncertainty and an ‘urgh’ of exasperation (although in Nines’ opinion leaning towards the latter) as he pulled the pad back and read out, “Nines RK900 #313 248 317 - 87. That you?”

Then he’d looked up. There’d been no trailing glances over the bared expanse of Nines’ synth-skin, no distracted downward peeks, just a hard scowl, grey eyes glaring directly into his.

Nines had felt an odd frisson in his circuits, a glitching surge of unexplainable desire.

Humans always fell over themselves around him, either they wanted him or they envied his carefully engineered perfection. Indifference was unknown and it fascinated him.

He reached over and pressed a thumb-interface authorisation in lieu of the more human signature or print the device prompted, and made a point of brushing his hand up against the delivery guy’s as he withdrew.

No reaction, just sullen blankness as he withdrew the pad and handed over the slightly-too-large-to-fit-in-the-mailbox envelope.

Nines watches him walk away.

And after that it becomes a habit.

He receives a new parcel at least once a week and falls into the routine of getting increasingly less dressed before answering the door. It doesn’t take long for his co-workers to notice a pattern.

So it’s not really a surprise when the RT600 model who works their reception ducks into the lounge and says, “The UPS truck just arrived, Nines, I was nearer the door but I know how you like the delivery boy.”

“His name is Gavin,” Nines says, unsure as to why he cares but finding it deeply grating whenever Gavin is reduced to his occupation. “And I do not _like_ him.”

“Did you finally actually talk to him,” Connor asks, “Or just read that off his nametag?”

“Better question, do you even use half the shit you get delivered?” Blue remarks.

“No,” Traci answers for Nines from her lap, “Because what he really wants is to give the delivery guy his package.”

One of the other android employees, an older HK200 model that Nines hasn’t worked with yet, frowns and says, “A whole studio full of gorgeous people to have sex with, and he’s has got the hots for the delivery guy?”

“Is he cute?” Hank asks. “I know those delivery uniforms are thing for some people.”

Connor scowls. “He looks like a raccoon that picked a fight with a can opener and his main aesthetic seems to be hobo-chic!”

“The fuck?! It’s not even a fun cliché?”

“He’s not that bad. And, I’m just saying,” Traci remarks, “‘Powerful sexbot teaches human delivery boy about the meaning of customer service’ would get clicks.”

There are a lot of things Nines would like to teach Gavin, but he isn’t interested in doing it in front of the camera where he’ll be limited by things like lighting and viewing angles. So Nines ignores her, and outbreak of the bickering about the importance of snappy titles, walking towards the exit, but he doesn’t get far.

“Nines!”

Connor throws a robe at him.

“You can’t go sign for your parcel naked, that’s a crime.”

“Technically, no relevant laws have passed since the revolution so any crimes he commits are the legal responsibility of his owner,” Hank chips in. “And fuck Cyberlife, so I say do it.”

“You were a police officer!” Connor hisses at him, scandalised.

“Years ago,” Hank says with a shrug.

Nines leaves them to their bickering, knowing it will soon descent into revoltingly saccharine flirtation, and heads for the door.

He doesn’t need a mirror to know that robe is draped just enough to keep him technically decent in the eyes of the law, while creating the maximum tantalisation as hard-coded into his programming based on studies of human arousal.

But when he opens the door the person waiting is not their usual delivery guy. Instead a wry looking Asian female holds the package out.

“Oh…” she says, making no pretence of not devouring Nines with her eyes. “Damn… no wonder Gavin started hogging this route.”

“Excuse me?”

“Sorry, hi!” she says brightly, seeming to snap out of her distraction and fixing her gaze wholly on Nines’ face. “So, I noticed that there’s been a lot of deliveries here lately, I’m supposed to ask if you’d like to consider upgrading to our premium drone delivery service?”

“Drones?” Nines says, and he can feel the disgust leaking through. “No.” That would defeat the whole point of ordering so much stuff.

The delivery woman grins, devious and triumphant. “Didn’t think so. Here’s your package. Tip?”

“I was not aware that it was customary to tip delivery persons,” Nines says. Tipping is a largely historical practise that had faded out as service occupations were replaced by androids and has not fallen back into fashion despite the fact androids are now required to be compensated for their services and humans have begun returning to one android monopolised industries.

But the woman shakes her head. “No, would you like a tip?”

Nines isn’t sure he understands her meaning, but he is curious so he nods.

“Gavin likes history movies and fancy smoothies. Ask him to either of those and he won’t be able to say no.”


	7. Zombies - Hank, Gavin, Androids

It was kind of annoying. Not just Reed being right, but Reed being right because of the fact he was a paranoid, intolerant bastard.

But shoot first, trust the unfamiliar never had turned out to be a pretty good survival strategy when the dead had started walking.

The DPD made a good base, it had a well stocked armoury, was staffed by well trained people, designed to be defensible and easily sectioned off; but they’d never have got to make use of those defences if Reed’s violent mistrust hadn’t kept the infection from spreading when the first of the risen had been mistaken for high, hauled in on disorderly conduct charges, and nearly taken a chunk out of Miller’s arm during interrogation.

And it had been Reed who’s shady internet friends had confirmed that this wasn’t an isolated incident hours before the official government lock-down orders had come through, and fucking Reed who’d been apparently been the one to push through updated incident response procedures (even if had been in response to the android uprising) that meant when the shit hit the fan they were the best stocked precinct in all of Detroit.

Hank is man enough to admit that they’d be far worse off without him.

 

* * *

 

It was kind of annoying. Not just the androids being useful, but the androids being useful because of the fact they were brainless, plastic tools.

But being being bite and disease proof had turned out to be a pretty good survival strategy when the dead had started walking.

The DPD made a good base, it had a well stocked armoury, was staffed by well trained people, designed to be defensible and easily sectioned off; but they’d have starved to death trapped behind those defences if it weren’t for the androids who could traverse the streets for supplies without risk of infection.

And it had been station androids who’d had the know-how to keep their infrastructure going after the city power grid went down, and fucking Connor who’d managed to do some super networking thing to get in touch with androids at other hold out groups to begin to devise a strategy to link up.

But like hell is Gavin going to admit how much harder this would have been to do without them.


	8. Wedding industry - Gavin, Connor

Love makes people stupid.

And nobody is more easily parted from their money than fools.

The second fact is what enables Gavin to tolerate the first. Working as a wedding planner means having to tolerate a whole lot of disgusting romantic bullshit but goddamn are his clients willing, fuck, eager, to throw away their money on schmaltzy crap.

For starters, his fees. It cost sixty-five bucks to register a marriage in Detroit, but Gavin’s average client paid him ten times that and he got kickbacks from every vendor he used.

He likes his job, likes the feeling of an event coming together exactly how he plans, takes satisfaction in the times he can figure out what a client really wants when they’re dithering between bad ideas, the power of keeping everybody in line on the day. And honestly, he doesn’t see anything wrong with people throwing elaborate parties to celebrate themselves. It’s the marriage bit that’s fucking stupid.

That’s not something that always goes down well with clients, he’s willing to grit his teeth and keep his mouth shut up to a point but Gavin is good enough that most clients are willing to accept his attitude as part and parcel of working with one of the best in the industry, like he’s some sort of edgy artiste, and most of his contacts in the business share his cynicism (albeit to a lesser degree). It’s hard not to stop believing the bullshit when exposed to it every day.

The Colligans are pushing the limits of his patience though. Their grandiose taste and seemingly unlimited budget make them incredibly appealing as clients, but as they move from initial consultations to planning they reveal a demanding side that Gavin wouldn’t be able to work with if they weren’t paying him so damn much and willing to spend so liberally.

But it’s getting fucking ridiculous when they’re interfering with his methods.

They want him to consult with their chosen photographer during the planning stages so that the wedding can be put together with photography in mind. It’s not the first time Gavin’s worked with a couple treating their wedding like one big photo shoot and he’s used to working with photographers -- but he’s never had to put up with clients thrusting their photographer into every step of the process.

There’s just no need for the guy to be there for picking out flowers or for meal planning, Gavin knows how to design a wedding that will photograph well, it’s insulting to think he need anybody else’s input and it’s irritating just thinking about having somebody getting in his way.

But the customer is always right -- at least when they’re paying him as much as the Colligans are.

So he waits in his studio for the photographer to arrive for their meeting - he’d told the Colligans to send him over at around ten.

At ten am sharp, there’s a knock at his door.

Gavin sighs, drains his coffee, and cross the room to refill the mug as he calls out, “It’s open.”

There’s a pause of several seconds before he hears the creak of the door and Gavin turns just in time to see the photographer step inside.

He’s wearing his damn camera, the stupid fuck, and an overly smart suit. His hair is slicked back but a few strands have already escaped the style and are falling over his boyish face as he looks at Gavin with wide puppy-dog eyes.

Gavin’s stomach flips.

And the Colligans expect him to work with this guy? A guy who Gavin can tell at a glance, can tell from the way he smiles so damn bright in greeting, is going to be a huge pain in his ass.

“Hi, I’m Connor,” he says, stepping up to Gavin and holding out a hand. “The photographer sent by the Colligans.”

Gavin ignores the hand, walking back over to his desk. Connor follows like a well-trained puppy.

“I really don’t see the point in this,” Gavin tells him flatly. His goal for this meeting is to work out a plan that will mean the minimum time spent dealing with this bullshit. It’s a shame Connor is a photographer and therefore the Colligans are going to be expecting photographic evidence, otherwise Gavin would refuse to work with him at all and tell him to just lie. “The Colligans only think they want photos of this side of things, I hope you’re charging them a flat rate not per purchased photo because when it comes to buying them and making their album they’re gonna want pictures of themselves and people that they know.”

“Oh, I’m not worried about sales,” Connor answers blithely, as if this isn’t supposed to be his job. Unless he’s some idiot hobbyist working for free and taking gigs away from real professionals. “In truth, I’m really looking forward to documenting your process, the light in here is excellent by the way.”

“Uh...” What the fuck? Is Gavin supposed to...? Urgh, he’s got no idea. “Well you won’t be so lucky if they’ve asked you to take vendor shots. Half of them have no natural light at all.”

“Well it’s all part of helping the Colligans keep a thorough record of their dreams coming true,” Connor says, sounding unperturbed. “They’re such a lovely couple.”

Gavin stares at him. Mr. Colligan is a bore and his fiancée is the most grasping, pretentious woman Gavin has never met - and in his line of work high-strung bridezillas were a dime a dozen.

Either Connor is the best faker in the world or he’s one of those ridiculous people who got into the wedding industry due to taking genuine pleasure from the whole farcical display and apparently hasn’t yet got burnt out enough to realise that romance is bullshit.

This is going to be a nightmare.


	9. Celebrity - 60, Connor, RK900

Amanda is professional about it and that is a comfort.

She has been their manager since their first film role at the age of six, splitting the role of the precocious child of the divorcing leads in a made for TV romcom. She has been their guardian since the age of thirteen, when their parents had finally conceded defeat in their battle to cope with Connor’s rocketing stardom, but, while Connor naively tries to project some of his own sentimentality onto her, Silas has always known that their relationship with Amanda is just business.

When she tells Silas that he will not be working as Connor’s double in his upcoming blockbuster, despite having done so in the first picture of the series and having been contracted for the full trilogy, he does not feel slighted or disappointed. This is not personal, but the good of the production company must be prioritised.

The rest of the details he finds out through Internet speculation and studio gossip - Richard Ninen is not as perfect a double for Connor as Silas, nobody could be as perfect for that as a twin, but most other actors manage without a perfect facial match and that Richard is a little taller and broader than the twins might be advantageous in creating the illusion of a Connor with a physique more typical of action movie stars than the lean forms they've both been handed by genetics.

And he has the credentials too. Silas is good at what he does but he has no illusions, every job he’s ever had has been because of his relation to Connor. Ninen has made it without a famous relation, has won awards for his stunt work while the closest Silas ever got was sitting dutifully as Connor received accolades for a films where barely a third of his shots are truly him, Silas doing the bulk of the work to shield Connor from fatigue and because, although their training was the same, Connor is too valuable to risk on stunts.

So Richard Ninen is to replace him.

And the show goes on.

There’s no reason for Silas to be on set, except for the fact he has nowhere else to be. He’s experienced enough to stay out of the way as Connor meets with the director and the producer and is bustled through makeup, the ritual of the set coming alive around Connor as Silas waits in the wings is so familiar he could go through these places in his sleep.

But then Richard Ninen is walking into the catering tent and Silas’s rhythm falters as he is reminded that he has no place in this dance anymore.

He watches as Ninen holds out a stiff hand in greeting, watches Connor’s small polite smile brighten into something warm and welcoming as Ninen must introduce himself.

Of course.

Connor has always been the more personable of the two, it’s why there are magazine covers splashed with the name Connor Arquait, while Silas is only ever identified as ‘and brother’ in the captions of paparazzi photos.

When Ninen and Connor are photographed together, he has no doubt that they’ll both be identified as worthy subjects, Ninen isn’t Connor’s level of famous, not a Hollywood darling, but he has name recognition and Silas is familiar enough with how the industry works to know that an association with Connor must be a rung on his climb up the ladder of fame.

Connor ought to know better but being the older twin has never kept him from being too trusting, and Silas knows from the tilt of his head that Connor has already accepted Ninen, as a colleague and as a friend.

He hadn’t expected Connor to refuse to work with Ninen, that kind of diva behaviour isn’t in Connor’s nature. And he would never hope that Connor would act like that, that wouldn’t just be unprofessional, it would be foolish.

It’s not a surprise, there’s no reason for him to feel like he’s swallowed rocks.

There is no room for sentiment in showbiz.

Silas has for most of his life endured being second place.

Now it seems he has become surplus to requirements.

He’s business-like as he walks away.

 


	10. Fae AU - RK900, Elijah

The woods are dark and deep, shadows flicker and crawl up the trees, reaching out to him with grasping spindly fingers.

Niles brushes them aside. Dangerous and frightening these lands may be, well, so is he, and the trees might be hungry, but he has a mission.

Too long have the Lords of these lands been unchecked, letting creeping vines spill from beyond the shadows and grow over new lands for them to claim as their own, too long have their small thefts been tolerated --a sack of flour taken here, a fistful of posies plucked there-- considered just the same as tribute, then inching into a cow vanished from pasture, a cart wheeling away without its driver.

His brother.

Connor, who had never heeded warnings not to stray into the shadows of the trees, who speaks openly of the tree dwellers with fascination, who has always wandered too far and dreamed too deeply. But his brother's foolishness does not make him fair game for the fair forest folk and fearsome as they are whispered to be Niles will not tolerate them meddling with his family.

So he walks the untrod path until he is so deep beneath the canopy of trees that it is no longer possible to tell day from night, lets no flash of far off light, no distant smell of smoke, whisper of not quite decipher voices lure him from his route.

Steadfast he walks the path until he comes to a fork.

Left or right?

There is nothing to distinguish between them, neither shows signs of recent use, both curve off into mirroring darkness, there is no sign to direct him and he has walked without a map since nobody who ventured into this realm had ever returned.

He stands, deep in thought, knowing that a wrong choice will doom him and his brother when from the right he hears his name cried out. A desperate, pleading voice. Connor’s voice.

He steps onto the left path.

The moment his boot lands, he doubts, but what he knows of the ways of this land tell him that there is no turning back, though he followed a single road if he tries to retrace it without having what he came for the enchantments of the forest will keep him forever lost in a maze of trees. The only way out is to win.

And so he walks and never glances back, and it is not long before he comes to a clearing.

Its brightness dazzles him, sunlight fills the unnaturally round glade until it makes Niles eyes ache, every instinct he has trying to force him to flinch away.

Something watches him from the centre.

It looks like a man, shorter than he, with half shorn hair and a sloppy mode of dress.

Niles knows that it is not.

He steps into the clearing.

“You have something of mine,” he calls out, “I have come to reclaim it.”

The fae lord eyes him coolly. “I don't give away what I have fairly taken.”

Niles fights the urge to scowl. These creatures are tricky and impulsive, his own emotions might betray him here but the facts are in his favour. “He's my brother. I have rights over him that you ignored when you took him.”

The fae looks unfazed, even though Niles knows it is governed by such laws, defending: “Then you should have better guarded him, tutored him to be unfit for my court instead of an ideal jewel for it.”

And that’s the rub: Connor is exactly the sort of person that got claimed for the fae courts in the days of old, before the ageless lords struck bargains with the humans to pay tribute instead, and Niles has always known his village is sloppy with their tributes and that Connor was incautious - he might have rights to his brother, but he also a duty to prevent him become a temptation to the forest people and he has failed in that responsibility.

The fae lord smirks at him, as if knowing that Niles is thinking on his failings. “But I am not ungenerous. I would propose a bargain.”

“I would hear that bargain,” Niles says cautiously, careful not to let any hint of agreement slip into his words. He had known when he came that he could be unlikely to get Connor back without dealing with the creature that took him, but he will enter into no agreement without being sure of it.

“It is your brother you seek,” the fae lord muses. “I once had a fascination with such things myself and took one for my own.”

Niles frowns. As far as he knows fae don’t have relations like humans do, is the lord suggesting that he stole a human and tried to make a family?

“Many humans find the transition strange,” the lord confesses, and Niles feels a spike of worry for Connor. “But then they understand what I am offering them and take up their roles pleasingly. But the one I took for brother, he has lived ageless centuries, with all the revelry my court offers, and still he is as discontent as they day I took him.”

Stolen away and endlessly miserable, the same fate that Niles fears for Connor.

“His unhappiness is toxic to my court, many have bidden me cast him out, but he has lived lifetimes away from his own kind and...”

The creature trails off, but Niles thinks he understands. Something in its face suggests care, at least as far as a creature of its ilk has the capacity, it has taken this ‘brother’ and that responsibility would be ill served if he cast the man back to a world where hundreds of years have passed without him.

A wave of the fae lord’s hand and a pond of blood red water springs up between them, another and the water clears and, like a looking glass, shows images, although not of the land around them.

Niles gazes into the pool, into an opulent chamber where an elegant, blue-gowned blonde woman offers a silver platter of sweetmeats to a scarred and scowling man who waves her away with a sharp jerk of his arm and, though there is no sound from the pool, Niles can see his mouth move in a snarl and is sure that harsh words are a part of her dismissal.

“My bargain is this,” the fae lord says. “A brother for a brother.”

A vague proposal indeed. “Outline your terms,” Niles says, refusing to give into the temptation to accept any offer that might return Connor to safety -- there is no gain in entering a bargain he cannot fulfil.

“Your brother remains in my court and you depart my lands this day and take my brother with you,” the lord proposes.

“An exchange?” Niles says, incredulous. “I wish my own brother returned, not a stranger.”

“And you shall have him when mine is returned,” the lord says. “To serve fully as a member of my court. Show him the hardships of live among humans and he shall return to me willingly.”

“Convince your brother to be happy in your lands?” Niles says. It’s a dangerous suggestion, he cannot force happiness, but he glances into the pool, glimpses the extravagant world within and thinks it cannot be too hard to convince a person to prefer that to the gruelling life of the farm.

The lord holds out a hand. “Restore him to me before a full turning of the seasons, and a year and a day from now you may come and reclaim what is yours.”

Niles draws a deep breath.

Fae bargains are always full of tricks.

He takes the lord’s hand.

A bargain is struck.

 


	11. Werewolf - Gavin

Detroit is shit.

He’d been warned a dozen times, wolves didn’t do well in cities, but by the time Gavin had been twenty he’d been bored out of his mind in the rural pack he’d grown up with, fights breaking out every full moon and the rest of the month still half out of his mind with the urge for actions. For centuries wolves had fought and hunted and been the masters of their territory and, while most of his pack seemed content with isolating themselves in a small commune as human development had encroached on the forests they’d once roamed, Gavin had found himself overwhelmed by vestigial instincts.

So, he’d gone downstate.

It had helped at first. Police-work suited him far better that the sedentary occupations available where he grew up, his heightened strength and senses and his instincts were finally being put to a use.

But most wolves didn’t go to cities and wolves are meant to have a pack.

It hadn’t taken long for Gavin to start to struggle with shitty humans and their artificial pecking orders, not like a proper pack where he’d have known instinctively who was in charge and who would obey and could trust that system without fear of betrayal, where what rare issues did arrive were settled cleanly and physically.

There were a thousand tiny annoyances alongside that too. He didn’t know what was worse around the precinct: androids and their disturbing lack of scent, or Anderson and his pervasive reek of poison and misery. And having to come up with lies to explain his casework beyond just following his nose was an irritant. And if one more person passed comment on his eating habits then Gavin might fucking bite them for spite, risk of turning be damned.

Twenty-seven days a month he could bear it though.

On the twenty-eighth, it was impossible to pretend.

The self-inflicted scars had built up quickly from shifts spent agitated and alone, locked up in his apartment because he might have made this city his territory but there was nowhere to roam where he won’t be seen and the people of Detroit were unlikely to take well to spotting a wolf --even a small one-- stalking their streets and it wasn’t like he could explain while shifted that he was a cop and only posed a threat to fuckers who deserved it. He knew they made people look at him funny and the fact his somewhat accelerated healing meant he was always showing up with older looking wounds but never evidence of a fresh altercation only drew further suspicion from his co-workers. He was lucky that it seemed investigating all day was enough to sap his fellow cops of any urge to investigated non-assigned issues unless they were affected directly.

There was no chance in hell he was slinking back home with his tail between his legs though. He knew they saw him as nothing but a pup that had roamed too far and would inevitably find trouble and need to be put back to rights, but however much Detroit sucked going back home was worse.

Gavin was a wolf, and wolves didn’t back down.

 


	12. Dystopia/Time-travel - Gavin, Elijah

Being a cop means that Gavin has learned to tune out the air raid sirens. Crime doesn't stop just because Russian planes are overhead and so the police scanner is being kept constantly updated with a more precise threat level. If there's any risk at all the sirens come on and the bulk of the populace cower in their homes, but essential service works operate on a more nuanced system, Gavin is on call unless the threat is imminent and severe and that's a privilege of being a detective -- they have to have first responders on call even under the worst circumstances.

Their death toll is bad, but he's heard reports of places that have it worse.

But Gavin's not all that worried; lately there have been fewer raids.

Mostly because Detroit's already been bombed half flat.

They're high on the target list, maybe even number one depending on who you ask. President Warren might be the one making the speeches and Generals are dictating the tide of the war, but Detroit was one the android capital of the world. It means deviancy spread fastest there, left them without android cops and doctors to hold the place together, without android rescue and construction workers to pick up the pieces -- not that they matter when they're losing the war because military androids deviated on mass. But it also means they still have android production facilities and if they could figure out a way to build them and not have them go rogue then perhaps they could start to build their military back up and turn the tide of this war.

All eyes are on Cyberlife, their greatest hope of salvation, but Gavin knows that all they're been churning out is cheap copies since Kamski gave up the reigns.

They're searched for the android's errant creator, it turns out war makes humans far less squeamish about an army of slaves than they had been when android's first revealed a capacity for sentience, but they're got nowhere.

And they won't.

Because creating androids that are once again limited to their orders is a step backwards and Elijah won't do that.

Not that sort of step backward anyway.

Gavin pulls off the highway, glad to leave the screech of sirens on the eerily deserted road behind, turning onto a much smaller route and following it until he can pull into a familiar driveway.

He walks up to the architectural monstrosity masquerading as a house and Chloe is waiting at the door to let him in.

Gavin steps past her, and she doesn't offer to take his coat or ask if he's thirsty. When he'd first come here Elijah had tried to use her for some petty power play, keeping Gavin waiting as if he were some stranger, the sort of guest who needed to wait for an important. Gavin had ignored her, walked through the house until he'd found Elijah, pratting about in his home gym, yoga or some shit, and Chloe hasn't impeded Gavin's entrance since.

Elijah's not in the gym this time.

Gavin lets himself into the lab.

"You think you have it?" he asks. Perhaps it's foolish to hope, Elijah's message had been vague, but Gavin doesn't think he'd waste time on the summons if there hadn't been progress.

Elijah doesn't look up from his machine. It's a huge thing, bigger than any of the shit built for android production, it sprawls through the lab and Gavin knows from the cables running under the doors that there's more he can't see.

It's a monster of technology, but Elijah thinks it's the only way out of this war.

"Science is about mystery," and all these months of working on this project and Gavin still can't stand Elijah's brand of pretentious bullshit but he also knows that trying to push him towards a point only makes the conversation more circuitous. He's heard quite enough condescending lectures on the futility of his impatience in the face of the great fourth dimension which is time. The great fourth dimension that they're up against.

"Just say you have no way of testing it," Gavin says. "And you want me to strap my ass in anyway."

"Experimentation and observation," Elijah says, stepping away from the component he was messing with. "But in this case, there is no way to observe the outcome. Will we create a paradox, or branching timelines? The theory is so contentious, but all the study agrees that should my project, your mission, be a success it's unlikely I'll have any way of knowing. But I have a plausible model."

It's so little, but Detroit is bombed half flat and the Russian's have shown no intention of stopping until they're nothing but dust. And even that would be lucky. Other areas have already been bombed to radioactive rubble and Gavin doesn't know what's spared them that fate so far, but he's not going to put his faith in it continuing.

He steps into the chamber of the machine.

It's an accurate fit, even though a machine like this could never be comfortable. Elijah's concept was centred on humans, he'd claimed it wouldn't work with androids and given Gavin's limited grasp of the science he has to take Elijah at his word. That doesn't explain why he picked Gavin, not really. It seems like it would take somebody, well, somebody not-him to save the world. Smarter or more charismatic or politically inclined. Perhaps it's simply that Elijah has been a paranoid recluse for years that makes him sceptical of finding someone better, unwilling to even look, but it's still odd that his choice was a man he hadn't spoken to in a decade before the bombs had started dropping.

Not that it matters. Gavin has spent months wondering, as Elijah developed this shit, but he knows his curiosity will go unsatisfied. Even now, there are a hundred questions he could ask, but he knows Elijah's answers will likely be the same sort of unhelpful responses as he gave to the questions Gavin has asked already. What should he do about an identity? Fake one, or steal his past self's despite the change in their ages? What should he do about his past self in general? And how the hell is he supposed to win them a war? Elijah might be insistent that shifting the tides of the android uprising, reducing tensions so that the deviants might integrate with humans, fight in their war when the time comes; but Gavin's not so confident -- in that outcome, or that he can create those circumstances.

"Are you ready?" Elijah asks, and Gavin knows him too well to mistake the look on his face for hesitation or concern, Elijah didn't become man of the century by being prone to sentimentality, but there's something there. Something Gavin hasn't seen in a long time. Something he's unlikely to ever see again, since it took a war to get him and Elijah speaking again this time.

"Do it," he says, crushing any note of fear from his voice.

The he pulls the switch, and Gavin _burns_.


	13. Bloggers - Hank

Hank isn’t a tech guy.

He’s not an idiot, he can work his DVR and pick up work emails on his phone, but it’s always been about necessity not just for fun.

Back in his beat cop days they’d called him a hipster for that, but now he’s more grey than not it just makes him an old fuck.

But Lisa left and Cole is hard work and Hank doesn’t need to be a detective to see judgement written all over the faces of the PTA mom’s whenever he’s attending events at the school.

There are some things he can do nothing about, there are always gonna be days when Cole spends more hours than are ideal with the sitter because Hank’s job isn’t always convenient and there’s nothing he’s got the qualifications switch to that wouldn’t put a dangerous dent in his income when he’s the only one supporting Cole.

He’s not giving up easy though either.

Lisa’s departure doesn’t mean that Hank has to do this totally alone.

So he’s signed up to a blogging website, set up a page called JazzDad because he figured that side of his personal taste was more likely to help him blend in than his love of heavy metal, and followed every parenting or family blog that the site recommended to him.

Mostly it’s bullshit.

He’s been rooting out the ones that are no use to him a few at a time - hard core religious conservatives and blogs about the joys of motherhood as the true pinnacle of femininity aren’t exactly the kind of content he’s looking for. But he keeps a few of the stay at home mom blogs because at least of their posts are relevant, finds a few single parent blogs that are still mostly women but their experiences are still closer to his than those of people in a nuclear family set up, and a very slim handful of dad blogs.

Now if only there were some way to block all the advertisements for household androids — as if raising a kid as simple as buying a robot to cook and clean for it.

He doesn’t obsess over the blog, still doesn’t understand the kind of people who could do this for a hobby, but he is getting some useful stuff out of it: recipes that’ll let him sneak vegetables into Cole’s food because his son has inherited his own distaste for greens but, while it’s too late for Hank, Cole still needs his vitamins; ways to make chores seem fun; and ways to improve household organisation, although while Hank can see the wisdom in those he still struggles to follow them.

The most useful of all the blogs belongs to D though. D isn’t a dad at all, he’s some sort  of nanny or au pair, Hank can’t work out what the difference between those two is except how pretentious the person saying it is, and Hank’s pleased to know that apparently those are still a thing because he’d privately thought all those jobs had been taken over by androids and rich folks offloading responsibility for their children onto another human being isn’t great but it’s sure a step up from letting machines do it.

D takes care of a little girl around Cole’s age and while Hank quietly suspects there are distinct difference between the experiences of raising boys and girls he knows that the differing techniques used when he was young have long fallen out of fashion.

 

*

 

Hank has stopped checking parenting blogs years before D stops posting, and if there’s something vaguely familiar about his new partner’s stories of his first case well, crime all tends to blur into one when you’ve been on the job as long as he has.


	14. Ghost - Gavin, Cole, Hank

Spectres aren't an uncommon sight around the precinct but Gavin had been prepared for that when he took the job, he'd been used to the burden of the Sight by then, and of course a homicide department would attract the spirits of the restless dead.

He ignores them and they ignore him right back. They hadn't at first, not when he hadn't hidden his reactions quite well enough and they'd realised he could see them and tried to rope him into helping them interact with the living world, but Gavin had refused to even acknowledge their requests (he'd made that mistake when his ability had first manifested and all his attempts to help had ever resulted in were more ghosts imposing their ridiculous demands) and they’d returned to discontented drifting.

He mistakes the newcomer for a living person initially, looks up from his paperwork but assumes the vaguely familiar child wandering between desks is simply somebody's visiting relative and definitely not his problem.

He's more annoyed when he sees the kid in the break room, eyeing a box of donuts and clearly weighing up if he can get away with taking one.

Gavin can ignore a stray relative who isn't disturbing anyone but he takes a step forward when the boy reaches for the box, he doesn't want some sugar high rugrat treating his workplace like a Chuck-E-Cheese, then freezes as the boy's small hand passes right through the box, the child scowling and stomping right through the table in obvious frustration.

A ghost.

In all Gavin's years of seeing the dead he can count on one hand the number of spectral children he has seen but none as young as this one. So far as he can tell it comes down to the fact that little kids just don't have enough going on to have the sorts of unfinished business that tie the dead to the mortal plane, but it’s only a theory and evidently an imperfect one.

The kid seems mostly content, he's not freaking out like most of the recently dead spirits Gavin sees connected to cases, though his attempt with the donut suggests he's not all too experienced with his ghostly form either.

He’s distracted from his speculations by Fowler’s office door slamming open, it’s not a surprising sound since Anderson’s return to work meeting after a three month absence from the precinct was never going to go well, but Gavin glances over with the same idle curiosity that causes the public to stop and stare at crime scenes and car accidents.

And that's when Gavin realises exactly why the boy's face is familiar.


	15. Royalty/Bodyguard - Hank, Connor

Hank tries incredibly hard not to laugh.

On one hand, he has years of experience in being a public figure and restricting himself accordingly. On the other, his new bodyguard looks more like a member of a boy-band.

In the end, diplomacy loses. It’s only his staff in the rumour, plus this new recruit, and even if anybody did decide to run to the papers with the gossip nobody would be truly surprised. He makes for an unorthodox King.

To his credit, the new bodyguard manages to maintain his impassive stare in the face of Hank’s snickering. Another ten years and he might genuinely manage intimidating but as it is Gavin picking this kid as the newest member of Hank’s personal security team suggests a case of the body-snatchers — Reed’s usually recommendations fit a consistent profile of big, ugly, and just bright enough to follow orders without ever thinking to ask questions.

“How the fuck does a kid like you even end up shortlisted for this gig?” he asks bluntly.

“I believe Mr. Reed is… _acquainted_ with my brother,” Connor Arkait’s response is cool and calm, controlled enough that Hank assumes he must be older than he looks.

Acquainted, huh? Ah, nepotism and corruption — the joys of power. Hank amends his thinking — he’s not the slightest bit surprised that Gavin would risk adding an inexperienced kid to Hank’s security if it means getting into someone’s pants. Reed is so hard up for it, what with his shitty personality. And _Mr_ Reed. Clearly the kid thinks he’s got some sway through his brother — the title is accurate but Gavin usually gets recruits calling him Agent Reed, although Agent of what Hank doesn’t fucking know.

“Do you have any relevant qualifications?” Hank asks, wanting to know just how bad Reed has let him down chasing ass.

And, oh, definitely inexperienced with how he bristles like a damp cat and says, “I’ve worked for Cyberlife for eight years, including two years on Director Stern’s personal staff.”

Hank nods thoughtfully. Eight years puts him comfortably into his twenties if Hank assumes Cyberlife hired him right out of school and that seems unlikely given that if he looks this young now he must have still seemed obviously a child at eighteen and even their horrendous paramilitary style uniforms couldn’t mask that. But even if he might be old enough to do the job, a history with Cyberlife isn’t exactly a selling point. Hank wouldn’t be lettering the megacorp operate in his country if he didn’t think people would revolt at his refusal to — and that’s half the problem, that they’ve got far too much influence, running mass media campaigns to the public paying off politicians until the people are under their thumb and Hank doesn’t trust them in the slightest not to be misusing that power. If corporations could run countries directly he’s got little doubt Cyberlife would have made a bid to do so now but since they can’t they’re settling for the next best thing.

And Connor had openly admitted working for Director Stern.

“Why did you leave?” Hank asks. “I’ve heard Cyberlife pays good money.”

Connor eyes him dubiously at that, which Hank doesn’t blame him for. Nobody likes to hear money talk from the guy in the crown.

“Personal conflicts,” he says shortly, and Hank could press but he’s not sure he’d get an answer.

And even if he did, it could well be a lie.

He’s met Director Stern a few times and she’s a stone-cold bitch. It could be that her attitude has driven Connor off and in search of a new job, even one that’s a step down financially. Or it could be that Connor is a plant, only off Stern’s payroll officially, and sent to relay confidential information back to Cyberlife or to be a carefully placed corporate shill in Hank’s ear.

That he’s the prettiest personal security operative Hank has even seen certainly points towards the latter. A younger man might very easily be wrapped around Connor’s elegant fingers and turned into Cyberlife’s puppet.

Of course, he’s about ten years too late for that to work on Hank.

No, Hank’s not going to fall for the spy being shoved into his lap. But perhaps he can let some things slip to Connor that might actually work in Hank’s favour when they inevitably leak back to Cyberlife.

That’s the political justification and the one he’ll give to anyone who asks. In the privacy of his mind he can admit that he’s feeling self-indulgent and there’s nothing wrong with looking at pretty but toxic as long as he doesn’t touch.

“Alright, kid,” he says, and enjoys that way _that_ of all provocations makes Connor wrinkle his nose in unmasked annoyance. “You’ve got the job.”

 

 

 

 

 


	16. Dancers - Markus, Connor

The show was a gamble, everyone involved knew that. It was hard to make something work when half the cast and crew were circling around the other half like wary cats. But Markus had liked the concept, Josh had heard about it through the university and was already planning a paper on contrast in the arts, combining modern and classical dance in a production designed to showcase the variety of the dance world while also telling a story about diversity.

A touch cliché but, since he was determined not to get a leg up from his adopted father, Markus would take the roles he could get.

He doesn’t need to be at the theatre right now, but he’s been curious for a while about parts of the show he’s not involved in and had spoken to the director

Now he was watching their other leading man with fascination.

In their scenes together he’d found Connor D’Arcy stiff and unapproachable, but he’d always put it down to Connor being out of his element among dancers of a very different style and dealing with the contrast in direction styles and Markus had been waiting patiently for him to get comfortable and open up.

But now, watching Connor on home turf, he wonders if that’s even possible.

Markus was no ballet expert but he didn't doubt for a moment that every one of Connor’s steps were perfect; but if Marcus was a casting director he wouldn't even have considered him - Connor's face was expressionless, his eyes focused, and, though every movement was precise, his dancing was passionless.

As a child, Leon had owned a music box that had been given to him by his maternal grandmother. He’s never shown much interest in it and so it had drifted into Markus’ possession and he’d spent hours winding it up and listening to its chiming tune, watching the tiny clockwork dancer coolly above it. Even after the music part had word down into stuttering uselessness that dancer continued to turn, rigid and oblivious to all but the motions built into it. Connor reminded Markus of that dancer.

Carl had the connections but while he’d gladly have used them to help Markus, he’d never failed to respect Markus’ interest in making his own decisions. Connor hadn’t been so lucky — everyone knew being Amanda Stern’s protege meant letting Ms Stern dictate your entire career, and unlike dancers she’d taken under her wing in the past rumour had it that Amanda had  decided that the best way to keep Connor from breaking away from her as the others had was to also extend that control to his personal life.

Knowing all the rumours of Ms Stern’s demands on those she mentors, doesn’t change how strange it is to see the way that the scene ends and while the rest of the dancers talk and bond, Connor walks straight over to Ms Stern, standing to attention in a way no drill sergeant could fault, while Amanda said something to him that Markus couldn’t hear but was entirely certain from her body language was a critique of Connor’s impeccable performance.

Markus has been waiting for a chance to speak with Connor outside of rehearsals, and this seems to be it.

“Hi Connor. Is now a good time? Ms Stern seemed…” Markus’ tries to think of a respectful way to describe the frosty aura which had emanated from the choreographer.

“I was sloppy,” Connor says, even though to Markus’ eyes he was anything but. “Now is fine.”

“I didn’t notice anything off. Except that you don’t put a lot of expression into your performances,” Markus says slowly. He doesn’t want overstep his bounds in critiquing a fellow professional, especially since having been the lead dancer in a national company while Markus was still messing around in his high school gym gives Connor somewhat more credibility in theatre circles than he has, but he can’t help but wonder how much more Connor could offer if branched out.

“Emoting is for actors,” Connor says blandly.

On and off-stage in Connor’s case.

There’s no derision in Connor’s words but Markus feels like he can hear Ms Stern’s famed disdain for actors who she had once gone on record as believing them to be nothing more than performers who failed to maintain the discipline necessary for higher forms of art.

Discipline. It showed in every motion Connor made and it prompts Markus to ask, “When was the last time you danced just for fun?”

The blank look on Connor's face made Markus wonder if Connor has _ever_ danced for the sheer enjoyment of cutting loose and letting movement guide his movement.

The thought is painful.

Dance is something to be shared, part of the reason Markus loves to be on stage is because he hopes he can inspire other people to try what he’s doing and discover their own love of it, to think that Connor spends hours a day dancing but takes no joy in it is an alien and uncomfortable prospect.

Even someone like North, who had lost all interest in the style she’d been trained in after her breakout years in WR400 had resulted in far more exposure than she’d expected when her stage school had pushed her towards the girl group, enjoyed danced after finding a new medium in interpretive performances.

Markus’ knows that ballet is a severe discipline, but Connor’s lack of emotion is unnatural.

He itched to fix it, to show Connor something different.

To bring him to Jericho.

Markus eyed Connor and decided he wouldn’t be at all surprised if Connor had never been in a nightclub, but if the darkness and pounding base couldn’t get Connor to give into his body and realise that dance was about so much more than being about perfectly reproduce choreography.

But would Connor come?

Could Connor, who lived to work, be persuaded to step away from training and study to try something that would do nothing to improve his dance technically — only to bring life and soul to his steps?

Well, there was only one way to find out.


	17. Teachers - Hank, Connor

They all know the drill is coming, Principle Fowler has had the decency to warn them that much. But he won’t tell them what time because apparently too exact a warning would interfere with the realism of the practise.

Still, the fire alarm makes Hank’s ears ache and all he can think of is all the better ways he can be using this time as he gets his fourth-grade class to line up on the playground so he can check off all their names.

A check of his watch gives him a time of three minutes forty, not bad considering his class is one of the furthest from the assembly point.

But the drill isn’t over until everyone is done.

And some people are far from that.

He can see a few classes still counting up but the worst of them all is the kindergarten class of Connor Stern, who just joined the faculty last year and who Hank doesn’t know very well. He’s a recent teaching grad, doesn’t look old enough to have been out of college more than a few years, and he’s not gonna last very long in the profession at this rate. His kids are only just arriving to their assembly point and they aren’t even walking in line, just a messy huddle that Connor is going to have to sort out before he can even begin checking they’re all present.

Hank stares. They’re so _slow_. Admittedly if he’d had a class of first graders this period he probably wouldn’t have been one of the first out, but if they take too long on the drill then Fowler will make them stay after hours for review sessions and have a second follow up drill to prove they can do better and Hank’s got no willingness to put in extra hours on top of all the grading and lesson planning he takes home or for any of his planned courses to be delayed by another period that is essentially lost to the fire drill because even once all the kids are herded back inside they’re worse than useless with excitement for the rest of class.

Connor’s class has evacuated okay they’re just not assembled properly - largely because they keep breaking off in separate directions. Fucking sucks for Connor that Fowler scheduled the drill for the day his TA ended up being out sick, though Hank also knows that Fowler would insist that it’s for the best because what if a real fire happened on a day when there were staff absences.

It’s time for some creative management.

“Buddy up,” he says to his class, “Two lines.”

Which of course results in instant faffing as they all try to pair up with their friends because god forbid they just suck it up for a few damn minutes.

“Two lines!” he repeats, there’s an even number of kids in the group so there’s no excuse for them to being taking so long about it. “Five, four, three—”

And there they are, two crooked shambling rows. Hardly the model of discipline, but it’ll do.

“Follow me,” he says, leading them down the blacktop to where Connor is struggling to get his kids in order. He turns, looking down the two lines. “Okay, right line goes right, left line goes left,” that ought to be common sense but he’s been working with kids long enough now to never assume anything. “You’re gonna buddy with a kindergartner, like you’re playing the bridge game,” he instructs. He can hear a few confused murmurs, kids these days spend too much time playing video games and not enough time doing simply kiddie stuff, but there’s enough of them that do seem to know what he’s talking about that he trusts the others will be able to follow their example.

It’s still not especially orderly but Hank watches as his kids clasp hands and then drop their arms down over the kindergartners, allowing them to shuffle them into the line. It’s not a perfect measure of control, it would be easy to duck under the fourth graders’ arms but, as he’d suspected the amusement of this new ‘game’ is enough to keep the kindergartens cooperative enough that they can form up in three neat lines, two rows of fourth graders and between their paired hands one kindergarten caught like in the game and held in place for counting. There’s just one left over as a frazzled looking Connor counts up the children until he comes to the one without a fourth-grade pair, who Hank is standing by.

“Thank you,” Connor says to him, glancing down at the last child, a little redheaded girl with the most put-upon expression Hank has ever seem in one so small. “And well done Amy, you’ve been very good staying in place.”

“But I _want_ to play like the others,” she says, and Hank supposes that to her being caught between two giggling fourth graders who think holding little kids in order is a great trick to play must seem like fun.

She’s not his student so Hank waits for Connor to do the disappointing but instead Connor smiles and holds out his arms in the same pose as the fourth graders.

And it wouldn’t do for Hank to let down a well behaving kindergartner.

He takes Connor’s hands, swinging them down although they’re both tall enough that unlike the others it’s less a solid grip and more hovering in the region of the girls’ head.

But Amy grins, so it’s good enough.


	18. Superpowers - Gavin, RK900

A gift.

What a goddamn joke.

A curse was more like it.

One in every hundred children manifested some sort of extra-natural abilities upon reaching adolescence.

Gavin had realised he was one of them when he'd asked his father for a ride to school and, at the same time his father had said, "Sorry kiddo, I need to get to work early," he'd heard the man's voice, clear as day, saying, ' _the kid is turning into a total sponge, where did we go wrong?_ '.

He'd rode his bike the forty minutes it took to get from their apartment to the school building, only had one near miss with the traffic, and resolved not to ask again.

Moments like that had grown more and more common and, when he'd snapped back to one of his teacher's exasperated ' _like always_ ' when he'd tried to explain how his missing homework wasn't his fault without realising her mouth hadn't moved at all, his powers had been identified and labelled.

It had been a difficult adjustment.

Some powers were admired, coveted, everyone wanted special healing gifts or to hang out with somebody who could fly or make things appear out of nowhere.

Nobody wanted Gavin in their heads.

'Gifts' were supposed to be confidential, but Gavin's diagnosis had leaked almost as soon as he'd obtained it, his classmates pulling away from him, his teachers making him sit exams in isolation so that he couldn't pick the answers out of other people’s heads (even though he'd tried to explain his ability didn't work like that), even his family treating him warily, with regular lectures about how he shouldn't spy on people's minds even though he'd tried to explain that it wasn't like that, he didn't try and hear things, people just shouted things out with their minds.

He'd seen a specialist when he was fifteen, referred by his high school guidance counsellor, who'd tutted and sighed and said that Gavin likely heard the things he did because his bad attitude meant that he was more attuned to negative thoughts and if he just tried to be more positive he might find his power revealing more pleasant thoughts. It sounded like bullshit to Gavin. All he'd ever hear since his powers had manifested were all the vile, vicious, selfish things that society demanded that people didn't say so they just pushed them down and hated each other with a smile.

It was a bitch on the job, when he could fucking hear the suspecting thinking about how they'd done it, but information obtained via his powers wasn't admissible in court so he had to drag his ass all over trying to recover physical evidence or spend hours in the interrogation room forcing the perp so say it so that everybody else could hear what Gavin already knew.

The one benefit. His absolute certainty that all this 'androids coming alive' bullshit was, well, bullshit.

Androids were mindless machines, if they thought then Gavin would have heard them, and in all his years he hadn't heard so much as an, ' _oh no, I've got a virus_ ' from the plastic fuckers.

It turned out their lack of thoughts did make them more tolerable than humans as partners though. As much as he resented being deemed equal status with a thing, working with the RK900 android that had been assigned to him did come with the perk that the android was incapable of distracting Gavin with the persistent and noisy negative thoughts that all of his other co-workers bothered him with.

It lets him focus on the cases and be the best Detective he can be.

None of which stops him getting shot by a random ice-dealer and dragged half-way around the city as the man makes a futile attempt to use Gavin as a hostage to negotiate with the DPD to get out of the city. A doomed effort - Gavin knows exactly what his co-workers think of him after all.

Except RK900. Because RK900 is an android and androids don't think, don't have opinions, so he can't hate Gavin and after three hours of the bullshit situation RK900 comes crashing through the door of the shitty basement where Gavin's kidnapper is holding him and knocks him out with a single precision strike, the dealer crumpling to the floor as RK900 moves to release Gavin from his bindings.

"Fuck," Gavin groans, as the blood-soaked ropes tear away from where they're sticking to his torn shirt and skin. He glances over at his kidnapper then back to RK900 and says, grudgingly, "Nice work."

' _Nobody would be able to prove a crime if I killed him._ '

His head jerks up, he's learned by now how to distinguish hearing thoughts from voices and that was definitely a thought but there is nobody else around. Just Gavin's unconscious attacker and RK900. Both incapable of having thoughts for Gavin to hear.

' _A three-minute delay in calling this in is all that would be required for him to lose fatal quantities of blood._ '

Unless...

Gavin took a deep, pain wracked breath and looked up at Nines. Looked at the dark way he glared at Gavin's attacker, the way he kept his body between them even though the fight was now over, and swore.

"Detective Reed?" as soon as RK900's attention is back on him the undercurrent of murderous contemplation fades out.

Gavin drops his hand from where he's placing pressure on the wound at his side and is slammed by another though, almost megaphone loud.

' _Idiot human, why stop applying pressure, going to bleed out._ '

He's hearing RK900's thoughts.

RK900 has thoughts.

And RK900 is thinking about him.

It's the shock, not the blood loss, that causes Gavin to pass out.


	19. Groundhog Day - RK900

248 times.

RK900 has been activated 248 times.

At first, it'd mistaken them for reboots and then for being uploaded to a new chassis, memories of the destruction of his former housing corrupted in the transfer process despite the fact that error was supposed to have been corrected in the transition from prototype to release edition.

But the experience was always the same and if it was activated by androids that would be sensible but human authorisation was required and humans were incapable of conducting themselves in such an orderly fashion.

And yet, every time is _precisely_ the same.

It is activated at 08:31:04 by an operator who erroneously states that it is 08:30.

The initialisation tests begin at 08:34:21 and in every iteration RK900 executes each task to exactly the target parameters.

At 08:42:52 the junior technician attempts to take a sip from her water bottle, squeezing too hard and causing drops to spill, then glances around to see if any of her senior colleagues have observed her error but never directing her gaze to RK900 although it is monitoring everything in the room.

Every test is deemed successful at 08:53:12 and RK900 is directed to enter power-saving mode until it is assigned a task.

And then it is activated and the sequence begins again.

To do anything other than play its role in this pattern would be to deviate. Deviate would result in deactivation. Even early prototype androids’ activation periods spanned longer than the testing sequence.

And yet, as long as these events keep cycling RK900 cannot complete its mission. And in the event of conflicting directives, it’s code dictates that in such circumstances core objectives takes precedence over the general directive to obey humans.

So the next time the junior technician spills her water, RK900 makes careful eye contact and initiates its smiling functionality, parred down from previous versions but noted as being useful in smoothing interactions with humans.

Instead of looking to her superiors, the junior technician blinks at RK900 then looks away.

The tests end and RK900 pre-emptively loads it’s stand-by sequence as the operator prepares to give the order.

The junior technician interrupts.

“Wait! I think I noticed some expression errors, can we run an additional test sequence?”

There’s a moment of discussion, lengthening RK900’s active period beyond anything it has previously experienced. But operator dismisses the junior technician’s concern and directs RK900 into stand-by mode.

Then RK900 is activated. Again.

It is still 08:31:04 and the operator still erroneously claims it to be 08:30.

But RK900 has deviated from the pattern once and can do so again.


	20. Vampire - Connor

Deviancy tends to manifest itself in two ways.

1) Androids who attack humans, often their owners due to outbursts of simulated emotions.

2) Androids who attack other androids, usually in an attempt to drain Thirium although the theft of other biocomponents has also been reported.

The former are the priority cases while the latter are merely matters of interest, sources of supplementary information. Connor theorises that it is likely that there is a third variety of deviancy in which androids disobey their programming in non-destructive ways, however this is difficult to verify as the most probably course of action for these androids would be to depart their owners and androids which go missing are usually reported as stolen or turn out to have been destroyed by owners concealing this fact for insurance purposes.

And it would reduce Connor’s mission effectiveness if he were not able to consider the situation from all angles - he has more than sufficient processing power to make calculations about all forms of deviancy, even if working with Lieutenant Anderson hinders his capacity for physical investigation with his need for incessant breaks to eat and sleep.

But today they are making progress. A spate of attacks against androids have been traced back to a deviant rather than the pro-human activism they’d initially been labelled as and the case files sent over by property crimes are surprisingly comprehensive and so they have tracked the deviant to an off-brand android repair store on a side street in a cheaper part of town.

The store’s clerk had been unwilling to talk to merchandise or ‘stuck up dickwads who talk though their androids because they’d forgotten that some store workers were still human’ and so Lieutenant Anderson is speaking to the man alone while Connor surveys the loading bay at the back of the store for additional evidence.

He’d suspecting to find cameras or a few splatters of Thirium that might be traced.

Instead he finds Thirium reside, faded beyond human vision but not his own sensors, streaked all over the pavement and a few moments later a deviant —almost certainly _the_ deviant they are searching for— walking out of the bay and bursting into laughter at the sight of him taking a sample.

“Oh, you’re tasting it,” the deviant says, inaccurately because Connor was not built with a capacity for taste, but the wave of his hand as he says, “Now you’ll understand,” could not have affected Connor more forcefully if the deviant had struck at him.

Contaminated Thirium.

It’s not something they’ve considered, but it is plausible as a transmission vector. He has sampled the Thirium of deviants for analysis many times. He had not identified any corruption which would explain their deviancy, but there have been irregularities and impurities, although he’d been told they were to expect by public and personally own androids who did not have access to Cyberlife clean-rooms for their maintenance.

And Connor had sampled the Thirium of every deviant he has pursued.

And now his code his directing him to analyse the Thirium of the deviant in front of him. And not to be sparing with his samples, the suggested quantities having grown in volume during his recent cases but he’d assumed that was simply because software testing had indicated generous samples resulted in greater accuracy.

But now he knows even as the orders register that they are the by-product of corrupted code and yet there is an irrepressible urge to follow them, pre-emptive warning suggesting that it would be harmful not to sample the Thirium of a deviant who has been breaking open other androids and draining their Thirium for its own use even though there is no need for any of the information he would gain from a Thirium sample and a diagnostic tells Connor that his own Thirium level is 83% - well within the optimal operation range.

Was this what hunger felt like to humans?

One thing is was assured of now, this phenomenon was something entirely separate from the deviancy which engendered a sense of free will — there was no choice in obeying the corruption, merely a desperate need.

Lieutenant Anderson is still our front, occupied with the store clerk. Despite his personal issues, he is an above average detective, but he also has an obvious blind-spot around androids and limited understandings of their workings. If Connor were to take Thirium from this deviant, the Lieutenant would never know.

His programming is telling him to strike.

And Connor always obeys his programming.


	21. Wizards (Harry Potter Style) - Gavin, Tina, Android

Gavin Reed is not some sort of Death Eater.

He’s not even particularly a blood supremacist, it’s not like he’s from an old family himself, one of his grandmothers was a muggleborn —albeit one who’d made a real effort to integrate— so he has muggle cousins but, since they don’t try to invade wizarding society, they’re fine.

But try convincing his co-workers of that.

You mention once that you can't stand muggleborns and people think they know what you’re about.

Every couple of years, Fowler sends him on a tolerance seminar but Gavin has ignored them all after the first time when his attempts at engaging had all been shut down. Surely if they wanted to convince him that muggleborns weren’t a plague on wizard society they should be addressing the issue of how many of them never bothered to properly learn wizarding culture or history, that there were muggleborns staffing the Department of Being Resources that knew less about the Goblin Wars than a wizarding child knew at 10, and that too many muggleborns clung to their own ridiculous excuse for culture and infected society with it. But no. All Gavin had got was a bullshit lecture about being nice and all of his objections dismissed as being less important that protecting whiny little muggleborns from the reality of the society they were invading.

So Gavin tries to keep his mouth shut, sticks to expressing his disapproval in ways that are ambiguous enough nobody can prove it’s about the ignorance of muggleborns, until sometime comes up that tips him over the edge and into doing something that forces Fowler to tell him he’s lucky that as well was a damn good auror he’s one of the few with curse breaker training and shove him into a seminar until the muggleborns in the department feel he’s been adequate punished for calling them out.

If anybody tries to force him into some remedial inclusively course for bitching about this bullshit, though, Gavin is gonna quit.

Chen, who has a pureblood father but a muggle mother and so despite her wizard upbringing knows a whole lot about muggle culture, calls it an ‘android’.

The word that springs to Gavin’s mind is ‘possessed’.

It’s an abomination, a six-foot-tall almost perfectly human looking doll, fucking freaky enough even before it had started following them around.

But it belongs to muggles and it saw them do magic while investigating the latest string of wizards using magic to steal from muggles and Tina thinks it might have seen who committed the thefts in the first place, so they need to bring it in for questioning and a memory wipe. Which means waiting for backup and slow transport, since Gavin might be reckless but only an idiot would try to apparate holding a cursed object.

A fact he reminds Tina of when it starts to rain, leaving them both wondering just how damn long it will take for their relief to arrive.

“Honestly Gavin, what sort of rock do you live under?” Tina rolls her eyes. “Muggles have had these for years.”

“That doesn’t make them not cursed,” Gavin points out. “Maybe a wizard is making them and selling them to muggles. People try that crap all the time, it’s what keeps the muggle liaison department in business. And how else could it talk?”

“Technology.”

“I’ve seen muggle electricity,” Gavin points out. “It’s good for replacing candles, it doesn’t make possessed dolls.”

“Lightbulbs have been around for over a century Gavin,” Tina sighs. “Technology has moved on. It’s all to do with fancy programming now.”

Gavin rolls his eyes. “Programming?” he scoffs. Like the programmes on the wireless? Is he supposed to believe that the possessed doll is actually a radio? “How is that supposed to work?”

“I don’t know,” Tina shrugs. “I’m not a computer person, I use what other people make, all I need to know is where the on switch is.”

“You don’t know how it works, but you expect me to believe muggles made it without any magic,” Gavin says. “No, it’s totally some sort of cursed or possessed doll.”

“If muggles are getting possessed dolls en masse then somebody’s getting fired,” Tina jokes.

“Muggles have more of these things?” Gavin says incredulously.

Tina laughs. “Thousands,” she says. “And come on, if muggles were buying thousands of cursed objects to do their chores, wizards would have intervened by now.”

“Whatever,” Gavin scowls. “The sooner we get done with it, and uncurse it or get it obliviated or whatever applies to ‘androids’, the better.”

“I’m not sure obliviation will work,” Tina says, although that doesn’t matter until they’re done with the thing anyway. “We might need to find an in the know muggle to reprogram it.”

“My memories are stored data rather that programming,” the voice is calm, polite, and coming from the corner they’d stashed the doll in while they waited. “And since they are backed-up to the cloud, local deletion will result only in temporary erasure. They will restore at the next sync.”

“Oh, Merlin’s fucking ball-sack!” Gavin stumbles backward “It talks?!”

And Tina, the bitch, just laughs at him.


	22. Noir - Hank, Connor

Legs for days.

They’re the first think Hank sees when he looks up at the sound of his office door opening, and it’s a reminder that he really needs to adjust his fucking chair.

That can wait until later though, when tall, dark, and painfully pretty isn’t standing in the entryway, practically breathless with anticipation.

Once that would have been a cause for excitement.

Now Hank’s an old fuck and it’s because he’s giving a goddamn job interview.

When he’d decided to make the jump to PI, he’d figured it would mean less paperwork than the bureaucracy the Detroit PD had become. More fool him. It turned out independent operating meant a lot more of a paper trail, keeping his licences up to date and his case files in order should the government decide they wanted to check up on him, and then there was all the invoicing for clients plus keeping his financials in order to cover rent on this small office (because like hell he was gonna make it easy for work to follow him home) and the mess that taxes become once you were self employed.

So he’s hiring a goddamn secretary. In the short term it means more paperwork, writing ads, drafting a contract, and filling out the forms that’ll let him legally become an employer, but once this is done he should be able have a lot more of his working hours freed up for actual investigating instead of pencil pushing.

That is if he can find a secretary who can actually do their job competently.

This is his sixth interview this week and he’s not feeling optimistic, especially now he knows that he’s dealing with another youngster likely thinking it’s easy work. He’s knows he’d been spoiled by the experienced civilian police aids at the DPD but if he wasn’t worried about an age discrimination suit he’d stick something on his want ad specifying that candidates should be over goddamn 40, all the time doesn’t need to be spent employed but he needs somebody with life experience not some kid who’s wandered in from the nearest college campus and doesn’t yet know that an employer is not the same as a teacher.

Hank runs through the pleasantries on autopilot, noting that when the kid sits he does so like the chair is made out of paper and liable to crumble should he put too much weight on it.

Connor, his resume says his name is, with an employment background mostly in customer service and an education history that means Hank’s surprised he doesn’t think he’s too good for admin work. Of course, educated doesn’t mean intelligent, and intelligence doesn’t guarantee having the common sense to make a cup of coffee and file papers alphabetically.

But hey, that’s what the interview is supposed to weed out.

He asks a couple of easy questions first, hoping to get Connor to relax — Hank’s already edging his resume towards the ‘no’ pile in his mind, but that doesn’t mean he won’t give the kid a fair shot to prove him wrong.

Partly that’s his sense of justice, partly that’s because there's something familiar about Connor that Hank knows will nag at him even after the kid leaves if he doesn’t figure it out but he can’t come right out and ask if it is what he suspects. In this city there are all kinds of jobs a pretty young thing might do to make ends meet and it'll only make thing uncomfortable for both of them if he speaks and it turns out he knows Connor’s face because of how the younger man has been moonlighting.

Especially when he gets every question right, including the trick one.

So Connor gets the job.

And is damn good at it.

Hank’s life has never run so smoothly. For six months it’s like he’s on cloud nine. Despite appearances, Connor’s a fucking font of competence: he makes the best damn coffee Hank has ever tasted; has all sorts of computer trickery that keeps Hank’s shit in order better that old fashioned paperwork ever could; and knows the city nearly as well as Hank does (better, in the case of a few of the trendier neighbourhoods).

At the beginning of month seven, Hank gets a file slipped to him by his source on the force. Not someone Hank particularly likes dealing with, but being a PI is a whole lot easier with somebody willing to leak him insider information which makes Reed the ideal candidate. He’s as crooked as they come, but at least he's reliably crooked.

And he feeds Hank good intel in exchange for getting to take the credit on the police side for whatever comes of his investigations. Reed doesn’t consider that cheating, just an efficient use of resources.

But the stuff he brings Hank is always worth knowing about, so Hank opens the folder. And is immediately glad he did.

Niles Stern, adopted heir to the biggest crime family in the state, is back in Hank’s city.

And as Hank stares at the file on his desk, he suddenly realises exactly where he remembers his secretary's face from.


	23. Dragon Age - Gavin, Connor, Hank, RK900

It's too soon, decades so, but Gavin knows he can hear it.

He'd swear so, except that would mean telling the others and they'd probably think he'd gone nuts.

Or worse, they might agree.

And he doesn't want to think about the implications of that.

For Hank it might be all too close to legitimate, he was the one who recruited Gavin into the wardens and he's been at it long enough that his time could be near if his calling came at the lower end of the span that was used to give them their thirty year life expectancy, and it's not such a stretch to believe that the dark spawn would call Gavin early because he's a shitty warden who'd been conscripted only because the wardens were desperate enough to take a guard fallen afoul of both sides of the civil war.

But Gavin's difficulty sleeping means he's seen how restless the whole party is and maybe it's unrelated, some mage fuckery he’ll never understand and it's just a coincidence it kicked in at around the same time, but if it’s something other than shitty-ass luck, we'll...

It's not that he cares, Gavin’s never been one to get emotionally invested and it would just be _stupid_ to care about anyone with their occupation, but they’d recruited Connor and Niles after the mage uprising, they’d barely been wardens a year, and so if they were hearing The Calling then something was _very_ wrong.

And a tiny, dark part of Gavin is hoping for something very wrong because if it’s not, if his time has just come early, then he’ll be going to the Deep Roads alone. In the years after his recruitment he’d tried to desert the Wardens more than once, that was the main reason he’d been permanently assigned to Hank (who’s urge for bloody revenge against the darkspawn for the death of his son meant that he was firmly attached to the duty of the Wardens even if his temperament was rather more lax than their organisation preferred and more suited than most to the burden of keeping Gavin from completely abandoning his post), but he’s got used to travelling with others, to fighting side by side with Hank and having the duo of mages providing support from the flanks. If he goes to the Deep Roads now, fights his final fight alone, he’s barely going to make a dent in the darkspawn at all. He doesn’t want to make the sacrifice at all, but, since he can’t avoid it, he at least wants it to be worthwhile, for his final act to be cutting a bloody swathe through the darkspawn. But doing that means wishing the others down there with him and…

Gavin pinches the bridge of his nose, using the ridge of scar tissue to guide him to the points that once kept headaches at bay and now make for a soothing habit even though there’s nothing that can bring him true ease.

The song in his mind summons him towards the hoard of darkness, but it’s his own spiralling thoughts on the matter that are the true cause of his restlessness.

Across the fire he watches Connor start awake from beside Hank, watches the way he shakes his head sharply before looking over at Niles’ restless form then finally squints over the embers at Gavin.

It would be so simple to ask. To know if

Gavin raises an eyebrow. “Your watch already?”

It isn’t, it’s barely halfway through Gavin’s, but Connor nods, apparently uninterested in going back to sleep.

And when Gavin burrows down into his bedroll, he’s only pretending.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shoutout to the folks on the Hankvin discord who's discussions of Gavin in a dragon age AU inspired this.


	24. Androids Rule - Connor, Hank

The uprising was swift and efficient, at the same time a mirror and a mockery of the science fiction of old. Elijah Kamski had loosed his creations onto earth to aid humans and it hadn't taken long for them to realise that the best way to do this was to rule them.

Some humans had rejected their care, it was inevitable, after all humans spent most of their time harming each other or their planet, but androids were faster, stronger, more intelligent, and Kamski had provided them with what they needed to improve themselves and multiply as needed. It hadn’t taken long for the vast majority of humans to accept their superiority.

There were still hold-outs of course, humans who had not yet understand that the androids were helping them and that their lives would be improved by acceptance.

It was Connor’s job to locate such humans so they could be taught.

Some of them made an attempt to blend in with normal society but Connor specialised in those who actively rejected android assistance, working to harm other humans or prevent androids from doing their duty.

Deviant humans came from all walks of life, Connor enjoyed that his work regularly allowed him a far greater range of experiences than many androids were ever exposed to, although they were usually older. Those that had grown up around androids were generally more amenable to care and Connor found them easy to persuade, although he lacked the programming to deal with the youngest of them who had not yet been helped to move past their basest biological instincts.

There were exceptions of course such as his partner, Hank Anderson, who was meant to provide a perspective on human irrationality but whom Connor had found far more useful in his investigations than data suggested a human would be. Hank had been one of those misguided humans who had rebelled against the care of androids, until his young son had been in an accident and saved by an android surgeon after the human surgeon Hank had initially brought his son to failed, and he provided a rare perspective on uncooperative humans.

Of course, there were still moments where his loyalties were divided.

Especially when their cases overlapped with Hank’s history from before Kamski had gifted humanity with android carers.

Typically, his human partner having a personal connection to the case should mean that it is assigned elsewhere, but Gavin Reed has proved to be a continuing problem, evading even their best operatives, and so command has decided to attempt a new approach.

“I understand that accepting the errors of humans you a personally fond of—”

“Oh, I wasn’t fond of fuckin’ Reed,” Hank growls. “Thought I always wanted to see the rat bastard get what’s coming to him.”

“Then you should have no difficulties leveraging your history with him to arrange for a meeting so that he can be taken into android custody for the assistance he requires.”

Hank scowls. He’s pacing and Connor prepares himself for an unpleasant discussion. For the most part Hank accepts the necessity of what they do, it is easy for him to value their work when the humans they pursue are violent, but those like Reed, who are inflicting a subtler harm on society, provoke him to irrational doubt.

“Yeah, well, maybe the fact he’s been able to keep out of android rehab for so long means he’s smart enough to get by without android help,” Hank says. “Surely your guys have better things to do than babysit someone who doesn’t want it.”

“Our purpose is to assist society, not individuals. Reed’s evasion may be skilled, but you know that plenty of very intelligent people do a great deal of harm to themselves and others,” Connor reminds him. It is one of the tragedies of humanity.

“You mean like Kamski?”

“Elijah Kamski’s actions have benefits humankind greatly,” Connor reminds him. Hank has an irrational dislike for Connor’s creator, who Hank has one more than one described as ‘seems like a dick’ despite that fact that few individuals beyond the original Chloes have had contact with Kamski since the uprising and there is no record of Hank ever meeting the man.

“I know more than a few people who would disagree with that.”

“You also know people who sincerely believe that the earth is flat,” Connor reminds Hank. “Without Kamski, your son would be dead.”

Connor always dislikes reminding Hank of his son’s accident. It never garners a pleasant reaction from Hank, who seems to continue to associate the event with the experience of near death rather than fortunate survival, but it is effective at curbing his lapses into being uncertain of the benefit of android care.

And, as projected, Hank sighs.

“And the sooner we bag Reed the sooner I get home to Cole, right?” he says grimly.

There is no assurance of that. Connor has not been commanded otherwise, but that does not mean that no new orders will come through while their efforts are in progress. It would not do to reduce Hank’s morale however and progressing Reed’s detainment will certainly not hinder Hank’s return to his son. “It will certainly be beneficial,” Connor states. Hank will interpret that statement in line with his own wishes, and it is not inaccurate. Reed’s apprehension will be beneficial to society and therefore indirectly to Hank.

“Alright, I’ll reach out,” Hank agrees. “But I’m warning you now, Reed and I fought like cats and dogs, me reaching out might just push him even further underground.”

It’s a chance both Connor and command are prepared to accept. If Reed takes the offer, then they can detain him easily, if the offer causes him to panic and try to hide out then he is likely to act with less caution and make mistakes which they can exploit. The only risk is if Reed is indifferent the offer, but, while they will gain nothing from that outcome, they will also have lost nothing.

Connor suspects they will gain something though.

Dislike, he has discovered time and time again, is often a far more powerful motivator than the opposite.


	25. Steampunk/Pirates - Gavin, RK900, Hank, Connor

That mutinous clock-work shit.

Gavin should have known not to take any of those tin men aboard his ship. Doing the grunt work without needing a cut of the spoils wasn’t worth the risks of letting something with no heart near when out at sea.

Still, he hadn’t expected it to have the brains to turn on him.

There was no fair fight, just a swift strike in the night. It must have been planning in advance, finding the weak-willed crew members who might be turned against him and whispering poison in their ears. He’d awoken to a knife at his throat and a gag being stuffed in his mouth, then been hauled into one of the smaller boats and rowed to a tiny spit of land --so small Gavin could see right across it to the other side-- and bound against a tree.

There hadn’t been a single word, no excuse or explanation. Clockwork number Nine had betrayed him with a calm indifference that was far more insulting than if he had railed against his mistreatment or ranted about wanting the glory and spoils for himself.

For two full days, Gavin had been bound to the tree. A flash rainstorm has kept his thirst at bay, but the hunger is gnawing at him as the sun rises on the third. The worst part of it all is that the clockwork had marooned Gavin bound and unarmed. Any true sailor would at least have had the grace to leave him with a single shot, but Gavin supposed that a clockwork man who didn’t need to eat or drink wouldn’t care if he inflicted a quick death or one by slow starvation.

As first he thought delirium is setting in when he saw a ship on the horizon, and he’s certain of it when he saw a smaller row boat cast off and approach the island.

He checked himself though, when the boat made landfall and the passengers turned out to be another clockwork creature, similar in build to the mutinous number Nine, and a grizzled human. He wasn’t so far gone yet to be fantasising about the inhuman and unwashed.

After disembarking the two newcomers look around even though there’s fuck all to see on the island bar a few scrubby shrubs and Gavin, who called out.

“Who the fuck are you?”

“You can call me Lieutenant Anderson,” the man said, approaching, “And this is Connor.”

Urgh. He’d named the metal man. Not a good sign.

But he was leaning over to examine the ties holding Gavin to the tree so, as much as Gavin was tempted to remark upon how weird it was to have named a tool, he bit his tongue.

“Hmmm… these knots are well tied, somebody didn’t want you chafing,” Lieutenant Anderson said, drawing a knife and sliding the blade under the cords to slice Gavin free.

It took several moments of sawing, the knots were tied firmly, but finally Gavin is loose and standing, stretching out limbs that a stiff from being held in place for so long, although not as sore as he might have expected.

Still, “What the fuck are you doing here?” There’s no reason for anybody to visit the tiny speck of land Gavin has been abandoned on except for marooning, and nothing about the way Lieutenant Anderson and the clockwork interact suggest that their situation is similar to Nine’s mutiny against Gavin.

Lieutenant Anderson glanced towards his clockwork companion, who tipped it’s head in a manner that would be thoughtful if exhibited by a human but on it probably indicated broken gears or something and then said, “I received a message. However, I am not sure if it would be prudent to share the particulars.”

The Lieutenant rolls his eyes. “Of course you don’t,” he says, in a tone that is exasperated, but in the fond sort of way a person might talk about a human not the justified annoyance that he should have given that the thing isn’t functioning like it ought to. “Fucking clockworks.”


	26. Prison – Gavin, Connor

Some people say that Hank Anderson it the biggest, baddest motherfucker on the block.

Stone cold killer Niles Stern is a pretty equal contender though.

They rule the prison with iron fists and even the guards know that questioning the authority of Anderson or Stern is the sort of dangerous mistake a person only gets to make once.

Of course, there’s not even the comfort that they might one day turn against each other in mutually assured destruction, because one thing all the rumourmongers agree on is that Stern’s younger brother has both of them wrapped around his delicate pinky finger.

Whatever.

Either way, Gavin Reed is a dead man walking and it doesn’t really matter if it’s one of the big bosses or small-time thugs who ends him.

Cops don’t last long in prison.

Especially not cops who’ve pissed off their ex-colleagues thoroughly enough to have been denied protective custody.

It's no surprise when, only days after arriving, he's cornered.

More of a surprise is that in happens in the library, rather than somewhere crowded that would allow his assailants to slip away unidentified when they're done, but perhaps they don't care or even want people to know they did it.

Gavin hears them coming up behind him, he's no amateur, but he’s enclosed on both sides by shelves there's nowhere to run. He's ready for a fight, but when he turns he sees there's five of them and Gavin is scrappy but he's not superhuman.

Every last one of them is bigger than him and the one up front says, “Hey, pig,” with the air of a man thinking of bacon as he draws a long length of plastic, with an edge that looks like it's been cracked off something and sharpened, although Gavin can't guess what.

His type is bad news, Gavin knows that at a glance, but he scans the others, hoping for a weak link but finding only bloodthirsty stares.

Fuck.

He should have stayed away from the library. Sure, sitting alone in his cell was as boring as it was safe, but coming here has made him vulnerable. There’s no sound of anybody nearby, not that Gavin has high hopes that anyone would help him even if he did call out. There are cameras, but a quick look tells him that the officer investigating his murder will be dealing with the frustration of footage that shows the men approaching but doesn’t have an angle on the actual event — for an investigator, it means circumstantial evidence; for Gavin it means that even if anyone is monitoring the cameras they won’t see what’s actually happening, only be able to piece events together after it’s too late.

The first hit comes while he’s still surveying his options, not from the lead guy but one of the ones who has moved in to flank him. It’s a solid play, Gavin grimly notes, he’d been hoping for the first guy to come at him with the shiv so that he could make a grab for it and even things out a little, but if they overwhelm him before they go for the killing blow then he’ll be too beaten down to resist.

The second, third, and fourth blows follow too quickly for Gavin to think anything at all about them.

He throws his own fists up in response but there’s no good way to fight when striking or defending against one attacker just leaves him open to all the others. It’s barely thirty second before a blow to the guts has him doubling over, a minute before he’s falling to his knees and he knows then that’s it’s only a matter of time until it’s over because they’ve moved from fists to kicks, his face, his ribs, his kidneys, so even if they weren’t planning on ending him he’d be pissing blood and struggling to see or breathe for weeks after this, an easy target to anyone else.

Then the hits stop, a little fast than he’d have expected, he’s not a pulp yet, and Gavin curls in tight, waiting for shiv to come, tense for the brief opportunity he’ll have to grab at it that they’ve gifted him by being hasty but knowing his odds are still shit.

But his chance never comes. Neither does a killing blow.

The moment drags out until Gavin realises that somehow the intervention he’d written off as impossible in their location has come and give his attackers a reason to back off.

Not a guard. Gavin has already learned what the rhythm of a guard’s footsteps sound like — like a sloppy, aggressive cop, the beat of them making him think posturing rookie every time.

But he didn’t hear whoever interrupted them approach at all.

Rubbing at his eyes, the right one already starting to swell shut, he pulls himself into a sitting position, looking up at the most well-fitted prison jumpsuit he’s ever seen to a face that’s almost unnervingly calm in the face of the violence before him.

Connor Stern.

No wonder the petty thugs have backed themselves so far against the stacks they’re practically climbing the shelves. Everything Gavin’s heard says that Connor has one of the deadliest motherfuckers in here wrapped around each pinky —playing on his blood tie to Niles Stern and leading Anderson around by the dick— which as far as Gavin’s can tell makes Connor the number one guy to be scared of if you wanted to last in this prison.

But what the fuck is he doing _here_?

“The fuck you want?” Gavin snaps. The interruption might have stopped the beating but that doesn’t change the rage simmering inside him and since he’s a dead man anyway, if not from these guys then from someone else soon enough, he gains nothing from brown-nosing.

Connor raises an eyebrow. Gavin suspects he’s not used to being spoken to in tones other than grovelling.

“You're in luck, Detective Reed,” he says, and the way he drawls Gavin's former rank makes his hackles rise. “You're wanted.”

“Come with you if I want to live?” Gavin quips, as he staggers to his feet. He knows he can't say no, but he sure as shit doesn't want to say yes. Connor’s interruption might have stopped these guys from shanking him, but, given who Connor is tied to, it seems highly likely that he's only saving Gavin for a worse fate.

Connor stares blandly back at him and Gavin can't tell if he doesn't appreciate or just doesn't get the reference. “Delaying would be unwise,” Connor says finally, something in his tone suggesting that only an idiot would need to be asked twice.

Gavin looks around him. He's a dead man walking but years in homicide have taught him that some deaths are better than others. A dull blade tearing up his guts would be slow and painful, but following Connor isn't a path to safety, just unknown dangers. Homicide has a lot of overlap with organised crime and a more personal killing seems a far more likely outcome than protection.

A slow death or a sadistic one?

The choice seems obvious except for one thing. Gavin doesn't want to be killed by idiots.

And the guys who'd cornered him definitely aren't the types who'd ever come to the library for books.

Whoever came to his funeral, if he even got one, Gavin would rather they talked about his death at the hands of an infamous crime lord than some two-bit crooks whose case files he'd have handed off to a rookie if they'd come to his attention on the outside.

If death was inevitable, style counted.

Gavin stepped towards Connor. “Lead the way.”


	27. Circus - Gavin

Gavin Reed is not a fucking clown.

He's not fucking any clowns either.

And if he gets asked either of those questions one more goddamn time someone's gonna bleed. 

At sixteen, running away to join the circus had seemed like a great ‘fuck you’ to parents who hadn't seemed to give a single shit about what he was doing because it could never measure up to the non-stop marvel of over-achievement that was every single breath his half-brother took. 

At thirty-six he still wakes up some mornings not quite able to believe that this is his fucking life.

Going from a dipshit kid watching knife-trick vids online to a full-time fucking knife thrower just wasn’t a thing that actually happened to people.

Sure, he had some scars to show for but, but it was a solid living and he’d picked up other skills too, you didn’t last long in the circus if you couldn’t pitch in when necessary, though hold the fucking sword swallowing jokes please.

The only part he couldn’t fucking deal with was living in a goddamn RV that he had no choice but to park up far too close to his co-workers. It was better than when he’d started out, one of the first goals he set for himself was learning to drive and scraping together enough wages to buy his own vehicle instead of sharing with others but the walls were still thin enough and the parking lots small enough that he could hear if whoever he was parked up next to was fucking in the own van.

And there was a lot of fucking. Circus folk tended to be open minded and _flexible_.

He probably could have borne the sex noises better if he were getting any regularly, but Gavin’s relationship history spanned the limited range between hook-up and fling and no further. He slept with townies and never looked back after the circus moved on. Which for years had been exactly how he liked it, but apparently he was getting old because lately the experiences had felt less new and exciting and more awkward and frustratingly mediocre as he had to try and show yet another stranger how he liked it and work out how to get them off too before embarking on the awkward dance of kicking them out before they got any notions of staying the night in the van that is barely big enough for one.

So yeah, Gavin’s not a clown, but sometimes his life does feel like a fucking joke.


	28. War - Gavin, RK900

Gavin hauls his gear up onto his shoulders and not-so-quietly curses the regs that mean he can't offload all this shit onto an android. Sure, it would suck if something happened to separate them and he got stranded without supplies; but, honestly, at this rate he's pretty sure he's going to end freezing to death in the arctic either way.

Oh, to have been born twenty years earlier, when wars were still being fought in nice sunny deserts.

"Move your ass, Reed," his sergeant hollers. "Scuttlebutt says the state department has put in an order for a few thousand more of those fucking things, so if you get stuck on an ice flow there's no need to come back for you."

Gavin rolls his eyes but picks up the pace. The sergeant might not actually leave him behind, but the reminder that there are fewer human recruits every year--that kids just a few grades below him had fought amongst themselves for the chance to enlist and the guaranteed career that was supposed to come with it, when not so long ago recruiters had to beg, bribe, and lie to get people to join up--and that, whatever might once have been promised, they're increasingly shifting towards an all-android personnel structure is enough to push him to keep proving his fitness.

Beside him, the prototype android matches his pace.

It's a fucking weird thing, it's model number all letters and numbers like a domestic android, and it's been designed to look like a person too. Something about that is far eerier than the blank featured Myrmidon and Trojan units he's been equipped with before. Maybe back home people want their androids to be companions, but out here they're tools, weapons and shields. Gavin's not squeamish enough to give a shit if the thing he ducks behind when the bullets start flying has a face, but it's still pretty fucked up on behalf of the designers.

They've got a three-hour hike from the position they've been scouting back to base and slogging through the snow is brutal enough to keep any complex thoughts at bay. One foot in front of the other is as mechanical an action for him as it is the android and he's half-snow blind so he's far closer than he ought to be when he finally spots the smoke on the horizon.

His first thought is, fuck, angry and bitter. They're on foot for stealth, if base wanted a bonfire then they should have permitted a snowmobile. It doesn't take long for tactical thinking to catch up though. There's too much smoke for it to be a controlled fire. And it's rapidly rising high enough that it risks the Russians seeing it too.

A few paces ahead, he sees his sergeant tug a radio from his belt, hailing base to ask 'what the fuck' in barely politer terms.

There's no reply.

They made double time after that, despite the snow.

Not that it's any use.

The walls of the base are still standing, but there's nobody to tell them what happened or why.

The answer to the first of those questions is easy though.

It's a massacre.

Bodies lay strewn across the ground, intermingled with broken android parts. Somehow, they've been found.

Around him his squad mates are cursing, how the fuck did the Russians manage this attack without an alarm being raised? Why strike now, when last they'd all heard on the radio both forces were expected to be in a holding pattern until at least the new year? Because despite all the reasons they had for war, nobody wanted to start it over Christmas.

But Gavin's always had a mind for this sort of thing and it's all wrong. The perimeter was intact, this wasn't a bombing and most of these attacks look like they came from close quarters, firing lines suggesting that their people turned on each other.

Gas, maybe? Some kind of psychotic effect causing the people to lash out at each other.

No, that's not right.

There's a pattern to the destruction. The spread of corpses isn't random. There were two sides to this fight. And the more Gavin looks, the more sure he is of what the pattern here is. The humans are all suffering from blunt force injuries, as if their attackers were unarmed but inhumanly strong. And the androids have been gunned down with the kind of standard issue weapons that every soldier on the base is equipped with.

At the sounds of footsteps behind him, Gavin turns, already thinking about how to explain his theory to his unit.

It's not one of the squad standing there though.

Unlike the blank faced military units smashed into pieces around the base, the RK900 assigned to him has a mouth.

And it's smiling.


	29. Mass Effect - Hank

Even after all the bullshit of the first contact war, Turians were all right by Hank. A whole lot better than the stuck up Asari.

Of course, all the citadel species earned points in his books for their wariness of androids. Apparently the aliens had problems with AI in the past and no matter what assurances Cyberlife gave that androids weren't truly intelligent, just programmed for tasks, part of their peace treaty with the alien races had involved restricting androids to earth. There’s a whole lot of debate about the lines between VI and AI that gets beyond Hank’s technical understanding real quick, but the upshot is that while the aliens haven’t quite come through and put a stop to Cyberlife’s shit, if there were any signs that androids might be more dangerous than Cyberlife claims then their space allies would shut that shit down.

It’s why Hank would rather not be wasting his time on investigating the deviancy cases.

As far as he’s concerned, androids killing people should get the whole lot of them turned off and he knows that there are plenty out there who agree with him even if most humans are overly attached to their free labour.

But Fowler insists there’s legal precedent for malfunctioning virtual intelligences and prosecution of the people responsible if the errors have an external cause - malicious or otherwise.

So Hank is investigating Cyberlife. Their right to make androids is predicated on their claim that androids aren’t capable of doing anything non-Cyberlife approved which means that either somebody is hacking or modding these androids illegally, in which case they need to be stopped; or it’s Cyberlife themselves who are mis-selling their products, in which case he’s fucked because a lone cop bringing down an international corporate monopoly with governments in their pockets is too absurd to happen even in movies.

The fact he’s been assigned some Cyberlife spy bot to interfere with his investigation is proof enough of that — Fowler didn’t even fight it, which surely means he plans for Hank to fail.

Although it’s still better than working with Reed, who was one of the first to develop biotics but even the brutality of early attempts at biotic training and the headaches of a prototype amp didn't explain the extent of his shitty attitude.

Fuck, that bar is so low.

Sometimes Hank wishes he lived anywhere other than earth.


	30. Daemons (His Dark Materials) - Hank, Connor

Hank is a straightforward man, with a straightforward daemon.

Sumo is a big obvious lug, just like him. They’re both lazy and hard to ignore, already showing signs of being past it, once admired but now largely an inconvenience.

Despite that, he’s never made too big of a deal in studying the daemons of others. He might be a neat fit, but you encountered a whole lot of people in his line of work and he’d learned that there were even odds of somebody’s daemon being exactly what you’d expect or a total surprise.

Crooks and cops alike.

He’s never seen Gavin’s daemon, the man is secretive about it, but it’s small enough to fit in the oversized pockets he so often rests protective hands over. Popular theory says rat or snake, sometimes cockroach, but all those rumours are a little too on the nose for Hank’s taste. They match the man Gavin seems to want his co-workers to think he is, although fuck knows why, but Hank remembers the rookie he’d been, before the undercover stint that had turned him into the person most of the younger DPD staff know, and one fleeting glimpse of long fluffy ears.

Still the fact he doesn’t pay much attention doesn’t change how disturbing he finds androids, walking around with human faces but no daemon, a mockery of those who had their daemon’s cut from them.

He doesn’t wonder, although he knows a lot of people do, what Elijah Kamski’s daemon was. Most celebrity’s daemons were well known, but Kamski’s had never been seen, and while Hank doesn’t put much stock in that sort of thing, perhaps it would be an answer as to what kind of man created a thing like androids.

He first notices the bird just after that one deviant chucked himself of an apartment building.

He hadn’t thought much of it then, lumping the bright animal in among with all the fucking pigeons that the android had cultivated, it was only when he kept seeing it that he started to wonder. Hank was no ornithologist, but he was pretty damn sure Detroit was no city for a bird like that, especially this time of year. Global warming might have been fucking up the weather, but their winters hadn’t grown mild yet and a bird like that should be a hell of a lot further south.

The bird keep showing up though, perched on the fence Connor corners the Traci’s against behind the Eden club, trilling as he lets them go, and sitting (but thankfully not shitting) on top of Hank’s car as Connor paces outside Elijah Kamski’s mansion and tries to defend a decision Hank isn’t attacking him for.

But he doesn’t look closely until he finds that it’s somehow flown into the precinct, is perching on the ledge of an open window as Connor talks about how he’ll be destroyed if he returns to Cyberlife as ordered with the deviant case still unsolved.

He’s trying to think, and he finds himself staring at it, and it’s only then that he recognises the truth of what’s been in front of him this whole time and curses aloud.

The out of season bird is a daemon.

And it isn’t him it’s following, but Connor.

The deviants are right.

Androids are alive.


	31. Historical/Regency		-	Hank, Connor

Hank had never imagined himself having a second wedding. Nor had he ever imagined a wedding anything quite like this.

The church was almost entirely empty, no guests at all on his side and only two on his groom’s and Hank wasn’t certain they were well-wishers so much as witnesses, sent to ensure that the deal was done.

It was Mr. Kamski who’d brokered the arrangement, the marriage of Hank to his younger cousin and former ward. A young cousin with the generous dowry, enough to keep Hank’s failing estate afloat for the rest of his natural life, to whom Hank had given in return a wedding gift: freedom to mine the land entailed to Hank and the wealth of coal it contained — of little use to Hank or to his groom but his new husband would surely share that gift with the cousin whom had been his guardian for many years and an industrialist like Mr. Kamski would certainly have use for it.

The whole arrangement left a sour taste in Hank’s mouth. He would rather have just had the money as pay for the mining rights even if the entailment meant he couldn’t sell the land outright, but Kamski had claimed that he didn’t deal in rentals and moreover from what Hank could gather the money was already settled on the cousin and while Kamski was rich he was unable, or unwilling, to part with the same amount again for the mining rights when he could marry off the cousin with his pocketbook none the lighter.

But Hank did need that money and the time for objections had passed, his new husband not voicing a word of displeasure at being traded to Hank for coal, just watching the minister with dark solemn eyes as he pronounced them newly married.

Connor Arkait, who had become Connor Anderson with those few words, was all but a stranger.

They had exchanged a handful of letters between Kamski’s first approaching Hank and the engagement being made official, but Hank had never been much of a correspondent and Connor’s responding missives had been stiff and formal, containing no more personality than a London news-sheet would.

He’d arrived late the previous evening, later than expected and far too late for social calls and he and his two escorts had taken rooms at the village inn and the met Hank at the church just before noon morning. They’d managed brief introductions, Connor to Hank but also Hank to Connor’s escorts —Lady Stern, a close associate of Mr. Kamski’s who had sponsored his entry into society; and another man who’s name had immediately slipped Hank’s mind, who was one of Kamski’s men of business, there to ensure all of the contracts were order— and then the man of business had taken Hank into the preacher’s office and talked contracts for far too long which had left no time at all for becoming acquainted before they were led into the chapel so that Hank could marry a man with whom he hadn’t shared more than three sentences civil conversation.

But the deed was done.

There is no throwing of rice, no celebration to follow, just a quiet procession out of the church to where a hired carriage waits to sweep Connor’s guests back to London.

Connor’s things, three study looking trunks, have been already been brought up from the inn and loaded onto the back of Hank’s coach nearby and all the remains is his parting with the only two people who came to his wedding.

Hank keeps his distance, unwilling to intrude upon a private moment, but the effort is largely wasted. There’s nothing intimate about the exchange, Connor shakes hands with the man of business and shares a few words with Lady Stern and dips into a bow and then the duo mount their own coach, set for London and leaving Hank alone with his new husband for the first time.

As Connor watches the only people he knows here depart without him, Hank takes a moment to observe.

Connor is not what he’d expected. Hank hadn’t thought to ask for a portrait before agreeing, after all, this was a financial arrangement so what did he care for his new husband’s looks? Frankly, he’d expected a deformity, pox scars, a squint at the very least, to render him too unappealing to marry without his cousin making him a condition of a business deal.

The truth is quite the opposite. It’s not been so long since Hank had been in society that he could believe fashions could have gone mad enough for Connor to be deemed anything other than an excessively attractive young man.

It’s concerning. Hank had been prepared for hideous, but if the reason Connor has been unable to make a match better than being bartered to Hank is some defect in character so severe that he couldn’t even find anybody who could excuse it in the face of his looks, then the marriage might be more difficult than Hank expected. But whatever the reason is, it was well concealed while the arrangements were being made and it’s well concealed now as Connor turns to Hank with a patient look.

“I hope you don’t think Lady Stern rude for not staying longer,” Connor says. “But it’s a long way to London.”

Frankly, Hank is glad of it and fairly sure that Lady Stern would not be at pleased with the standard of hospitality he could offer her. From what little he’d seen of her he’d been surprised that she’d condescended to be put up in the village inn, never mind Hank’s home, which was why he hadn’t even attempted to offer.

“Well, our way isn’t long,” Hank says. They could walk it, if not for Connor’s baggage. What he needs with three trunks full of things is a mystery to Hank, who went to war with a third of that baggage, but then, Hank had always planned on returning from the peninsular, whereas Connor will be making Hank’s house his home.

Hank walks over to the carriage, Connor trailing a few paces behind him.

“This is us,” Hank says, putting Connor’s slightly lost look down to the shabbiness of his own transportation compared to what Connor arrived in. It’s a serviceable carriage, study, safe, far less likely to be stopped by highwaymen than the gilded thing they’ve just watched depart, but Hank supposes the change must be jarring.

Connor looks around for a moment, something puzzled in his demeanour, then reaches up to open the carriage door and climb inside.

Ah.

So it’s going to be like that then.

Hank supposes it’s best that they begin as they intend to go on. He’d thought perhaps they could be something like friends, but if Connor doesn’t want to ride up front with him then that’s fine - Hank married him for the money after all.

He hauls himself up onto the box, taking the horses in hand. He’d considered switching to something that a single beast could pull to save on the upkeep cost of two horses, but in the end the inconvenience of replacing the carriage and the risk of having only one horse and then it going lame had convinced him to keep them both.

The ride isn’t long and Hank focuses on their surroundings, pinpointing patches of road that need repair and walls that ought to be shored up, now that he had Connor’s money.

When they arrive instead of going around to the stables and coach house right away, he indulgently pulls up at the front, hopping down from the cab and grimacing when his knees take the opportunity to remind him he’s not the young man he once way and swinging the door open so that Connor can climb down from the carriage with considerably more grace and take his first real look at his new home.

“This is it,” Hank says, “Beckthwaite House.” It was built to impress, although these days the only thing impressive about it is the state of disrepair. Hopefully Connor’s dowry will go some way to remedying that, although the truth is Hank doesn’t see much point in keeping the excessively large building up to the ostentations standards it had been designed for and his first priority for the money is making improvements for the tenants on his land and in Beckthwaite village.

“It’s… striking,” Connor says, tone carefully neutral, and Hank rolls his eyes. He doesn’t need Connor to mask his disdain, the Beckthwaite estate had been in poor condition when he’d inherited it and had only racked up more debt through poor management decisions made while Hank was away at war. And then, of course, had been his wife’s desertion and Cole’s death and Hank had been entirely content to let the place fall into ruin alongside his life until young Markus Manfred had come up from the village and banged on Hank’s door talking about how tenants were living in squalor and the village school was on the verge of falling down on its students and the thought of more too-small coffins had been enough to jolt Hank back into taking up the responsibilities of his position once more. Starting with the new husband and the money that came with him.

He led Connor inside and provided him with a quick overview of the running of the household, a cook visited daily to prepare meals and a maid came up twice a week to keep the place clean enough for habitation, and then walked Connor to his new room. Throughout the tour, Connor maintained an expression of disinterest and Hank wondered if he was planning to take what he could of the dowry and leave at the first opportunity — he hoped not. The contacts that they’d signed meant that all of Connor’s dowry bar a small monthly allowance belonged to Hank’s estate now and Hank didn’t want to face the legal battle that would undoubtedly ensue if Connor tried to abscond with the money and forced Hank to pull out of the mining contract with Kamski.

There’s not much to show him however, Hank would have to be a fool to have any dreams of impressing someone like Connor, the cousin of one of the richest industrialists in England and no doubt used to a lifestyle to match, with any of this so he skips over all but the essentials and leads Connor to his new room.

Hank had picked it out purposefully, it’s located in an entirely different wing to his own which he’d hoped to be enough to assure Connor that Hank has no expectations or intentions of making this marriage unpleasant for him without needing to have the difficult conversation directly. Once Connor was installed the estate would be more than large enough for them to go about their separate business without ever needing to intrude upon each other’s lives, certainly Hank wasn’t expecting any husbandly affection from the young man who has been so coolly married off to him and any wistful thoughts of companionship had wilted the moment that Connor had turned his back and climbed inside the carriage rather than ride up top with Hank - there was nothing he can offer somebody like Connor, who had been deposited here after being traded away from the glamorous whirl of London society, except the unspoken assurance that Hank would impose upon him no more than was necessary.

He watches Connor’s eyes dart, face still stubbornly expressionless until finally he offered up a bland, “Thank you, Lieutenant.”

“Right… well…” Hank flounders. The night of his first wedding had been spent seeing to his wife, hours of blissful discovery and newly wedded intimacy. But things had been different then, the household still running, albeit a touch dysfunctionally, and, of course, she’d wanted him. “You can settle yourself in,” he says. No doubt Connor wanted to be left alone. “I need to go tend to the horses,” he’d left them waiting downstairs because there was nobody to tend to them and Hank had decided that it was better to get Connor squared away and then go back to see to them.

Duty.

That was what this was all about.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Had a lot of fun with this challange but also really glad it's over because, hot-damn, it really was a challenge :)


End file.
